


Timeline

by hepaticas



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 07:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1029116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hepaticas/pseuds/hepaticas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thread of Eduardo's life has never been easy to follow, but Mark still manages to weave himself into every part of it. The Time Traveler’s Wife AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Timeline

**Author's Note:**

> Written for thesocialbbang!

♦ _EDUARDO;_ The first time Eduardo travels in time he is five years old and it is his father’s birthday. They’ve had a big celebration with food and music in the backyard and he spent the whole evening riding on his father’s shoulders. Around eight thirty his father lifts him off his shoulders and squeezes him against his chest, plants a wet kiss on Eduardo’s forehead that makes him laugh and try to pull away. “It’s getting late, Eduardo,” his father says fondly, pushing his hair back and smiling at him. “Time for bed.”

“I’m not tired,” Eduardo lies, because the sun hasn’t even set yet, not quite, and the air is full of laughter and barbeque smoke and he’s only had one piece of cake. Everything is hazy and happy and warm and he doesn’t want to go to sleep, because then he’ll miss it, but his mother takes him from his father’s arms and says, “Come on, _querido_ , I’ll tuck you in,” and he knows better than to argue, so he says goodnight and happy birthday to his father and lets himself be taken inside.

A few minutes later he’s lying in bed in his footie pajamas. He can still hear the music and laughter outside and then he blinks and he is somewhere else.

In the morning Eduardo wakes up naked on top of the covers with his pajamas trapped underneath him; his father comes in to wake him and asks, “ _Gatinho,_ what happened to your pajamas?” and Eduardo tells him, “I got hot, _papai_.” In the bright light of the morning, it all seems like a very vivid dream. His father fishes his pajamas out from under the blankets and dresses him, takes him downstairs and places a bowl of cereal in front of him.

Around lunch time that day, Eduardo’s mother falls down a flight of stairs trying to catch a Metrô train and breaks her neck. Over the course of his life, Eduardo will watch this happen over eighteen times and always be powerless to stop it.

 _♦ MARK;_ When Mark is young, his family lives in a big house in upstate New York, in a gated neighborhood where none of the houses have fences and instead of individual backyards they all share an acre of heavily wooded wilderness. The neighborhood was advertised as a ‘return to nature’ and the woods are considered community property, but when Mark is six his father gets permission to build him a tree house out there on the condition that he let the other neighborhood kids play there with him, if they want to. For the most part, it turns out that the neighborhood kids do not want to play there – at least, not with Mark; sometimes they use it for their parties, which he is only given an obligatory invite to – and so Mark takes to spending his days there by himself, because he likes the neighbor kids about as much as they like him and he’s not about to let them enjoy _his_ tree house.

One day when he is eight, he goes to the tree house with a toolbox under one arm and an old laptop under the other. The laptop was given to him by the lady who goes around the wealthy neighborhoods in the area selling cocoa to kids on snow days, like today. It’s broken and she was going to throw it away, but she thought he might want it, because of that one time she saw him sitting on his porch, carefully dismantling his father’s old car radio to look at its insides.

He’s sitting on the tree house floor, looking through the toolbox for a smaller screwdriver than the one he’s been using when he hears someone shouting, “Shit, _shit,_ fuck, that’s cold!”

Mark turns toward the window, one hand still in the toolbox and then there is a cry of, “shit, oh God,” and Mark puts the toolbox aside and crawls over to peek out and see what’s going on.

Outside, a naked man is stumbling around in the snow, covering himself with both hands and swearing really a lot. It occurs to Mark, in a vague, passing sort of way that maybe he ought to be afraid of the loud, naked stranger, but by the time the thought crosses his mind he’s already leaning out the window and shouting, “Hey! What are you doing?”

The man turns around, seems to notice Mark and the tree house for the first time. All at once he goes from looking panicked and desperate to sort of resigned. He laughs like someone has told a joke that isn’t funny. “Of course,” he says. “Of course. Hello, Mark. What’s the date?”

“December 19, 1992,” Mark says. He looks him up and down suspiciously and adds, “How do you know my name? Maybe I should get my parents.”

“You’re joking, right?” says the man, and then, laughing again, “No, of course you’re not. I should have known. Of course.” He’s quiet for a long moment, head tilted down to rest his chin against his chest, and then he looks up and says, “I’m a time traveler, Mark. We’re friends in the future. My name is Eduardo.”

He says the word ‘friends’ like it’s not what he wanted to say, and Mark hates when grown-ups say things they don’t mean. It makes him want to go get his parents and get Eduardo into trouble, but then he watches Eduardo disappear, fading into nothing with the briefest of parting words, only his footprints in the snow left to show he was ever there.

He doesn’t tell his parents about it. They wouldn’t believe him anyway. Instead he sneaks a set of his father’s old clothes out to the tree house and he waits for him to come again.

♦ _EDUARDO;_ Eduardo and his father leave Brazil after his mother dies, but Eduardo never stops traveling back. Even when he’s been in the States longer than he was ever in Brazil, he finds himself going back. He opens his eyes and Miami is gone, but São Paulo is stretched out in front of him; he is in an empty Metrô station, he is in the crowded grocery where his mother used to shop, he is in his old backyard, he is in his old bedroom closet watching his parents sing him to sleep, he is watching his father carry his pregnant mother up the stairs. In the beginning, when the traveling is new and scary, this familiarity is comforting, but as he gets older it starts to get frustrating, constantly finding himself in an entirely different country.

By the age of eleven he has been kicked out of six different American schools for cutting classes and, on one occasion, for ‘streaking’ through the cafeteria. (Given his record, the school had seen this ‘prank’ as the last straw; no one had noticed that he had just appeared, standing on top of a mostly empty table, completely nude and at least five years older than the Eduardo that was actually attending the school. When he tells the story to his friends later, he will laugh as he says that his eleven-year-old self was studying, fully clothed, in the library at the time, and didn’t even know what had happened until he was called into the headmaster’s office that afternoon, but at the time, it wasn’t very funny.) After the last expulsion, his father sits him down at the kitchen table and asks him why he _insists_ on misbehaving.

For the first time, Eduardo tries to explain about the traveling. When he’s finished, his father looks, if possible, even more disappointed. “Eduardo,” he says, “the missed classes and practical jokes are one thing – but do not lie to me. I thought I raised you better than that.” He gets up from the table then and says, “I will be enrolling you at a new school next week. This time you will do better.”

The next day he comes home to find Eduardo sitting across the table from an older version of himself, dressed in slacks and a button down that he recognizes from his own closet. Both of them look up at him, wearing identical sheepish expressions. By the time he is able to process what he’s seeing, the older Eduardo is already fading, leaving nothing behind but a pile of clothes on the kitchen chair.

“ _Pai_ ,” says eleven-year-old Eduardo, but before he can get anything else out, his father drops his briefcase and sweeps him up into a fierce hug.

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you,” he says. After that he homeschools Eduardo. He is never anything but supportive and understanding, but sometimes when he talks, Eduardo still hears, ‘do better.’

 _♦ MARK;_ Mark is two weeks into his first year at Harvard. It’s about negative one million degrees out, judging by how cold his legs are in his shorts, and he’s on his way into a little café to get some dinner before going back to his dorm, where he will ignore his roommates in favor of coding. It’s not that he doesn’t like Dustin and Chris – he does, they’re nice enough, whatever, but it hasn’t quite sunk in yet that he’s actually here at Harvard. He still feels like he’s a scrawny high school kid, working through the night in his bedroom with a pile of empty tuna cans on his desk, trying to earn a place here.

He’s not really paying attention as he grabs his food, ends up with a can of Coke, a chicken salad sandwich and a handful of napkins. He’s not a picky eater anyway. It’ll do. He turns around, heading for the nearest table, and that’s when he comes face to face with Eduardo for the first time in almost a year.

Well, not quite face to face. Eduardo is sitting at the table next to the one Mark was heading for. He’s got three textbooks spread out across from him and he’s paying more attention to them than he is to the bowl of chowder he’s stirring absently with a spoon. He’s younger than Mark has ever seen him before. His hair is different, shorter, and he’s wearing a suit, though the jacket is draped over the back of his chair.

“Shit,” Mark breathes, stopping in front of the table and staring, the sandwich and drink in his hands momentarily forgotten.

Eduardo hears him and surfaces from his textbooks to look up and cock his head to the side, frown. “Sorry?” he says. He sounds almost nervous.

Mark sits down heavily in the chair across from him. His arms dangle limply at his sides for a moment before he remembers the sandwich and drink he’s holding and puts them on the table. Eduardo looks confused but he moves his books out of the way and waits a whole thirty seconds before he says, “Sorry, do we… know each other?”

“No,” Mark says, and Eduardo looks surprised. “No, I mean, I know _you_ ,” Mark corrects. “You don’t know me yet. I’m Mark.”

“Oh,” Eduardo says. He looks embarrassed, for some reason. “Sorry,” he says for the third time since the conversation began.

Mark just shrugs. It’s not Eduardo’s fault he doesn’t know Mark, but he doesn’t think he needs to say that. Eduardo fidgets with his food and Mark takes a moment to take in the sight of him, studying every little detail, from the expensive cufflinks at his wrists – which can’t be practical for him, honestly – to the jagged scar that he can see through Eduardo’s close cropped hair. Finally, he says, “I’ve never seen you in anything but sweats and a t-shirt.”

“Oh?” Eduardo looks down at what he’s wearing, touches the neatly pressed collar of his shirt with two fingers. He fidgets in his seat under Mark’s scrutiny. “This is how I dress,” he says with an accompanying shrug that is almost apologetic.

“So you’re – you _are_ in the right time, right? This is – I don’t know, you’re not traveling?” Mark asks, just to be sure. It seems too good to be true; he’d been beginning to doubt that their timelines were ever going to match up like Eduardo had said they would.

“No, I’m not,” Eduardo says. He glances around nervously as if to make sure nobody is listening and Mark finally takes pity on him.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” he asks. Eduardo nods gratefully and packs up his textbooks.

♦ _EDUARDO;_ Eduardo sits nervously on the couch in Mark’s dorm room, turning a beer bottle around and around in his hands, occasionally scratching at the label with his fingernails. The beer was given to him by one of Mark’s roommates, a red-head called Dustin. Mark had shaken his head when Dustin offered it and said, “He doesn’t drink,” at the same time that Eduardo had reached out and taken it. “Yes, I do,” he’d said, puzzled, and Mark had frowned so hard at him that Eduardo hadn’t even taken a sip after opening it.

Dustin and the other roommate, Chris, are now talking about how Mark has never brought a friend back – _yes, never, in the two weeks I’ve been here,_ Mark intones sarcastically, but they ignore him – and Eduardo is just hoping they don’t ask how they know each other, because he will not know what to say. Eduardo has never been confronted with his future like this – at least, not to this extent. He’s run into his future self on many occasions and he did once run into a pretty girl who slapped him because she said he was supposed to be out of town, and then a year later he met her again and they dated for a few months, but he’s never met someone who _knew_ before. He’s never even told anyone but his dad about the traveling, which means that Mark must be special somehow. In fact, Eduardo knows he’s special even without that – he can feel it, a strange sort of familiarity even though he doesn’t think they’ve ever met.

Mark is still watching him with that same intense gaze, like Eduardo is a crossword puzzle he’s trying to solve. Eduardo is finding it hard to make eye contact with him, so he alternates staring at his beer and glancing awkwardly at Chris and Dustin whenever they talk to him.

“What are you studying, Eduardo?” Chris asks him when he and Dustin are finished expounding on the rarity of Mark bringing someone round. He’s got a slight southern accent and he says Eduardo’s name carefully, like he’s trying not to mess it up.

“Economics,” Eduardo tells him, smiling.

Dustin makes an excited noise. “Me, too!” he says and Eduardo raises his eyebrows, surprised by the level of enthusiasm in his reaction. “What year are you?” Dustin asks. “I’ve never seen you in any of my classes.”

“Oh,” Eduardo says. He hopes, distantly, that the three weeks he spent in Florida over the summer have left him tan enough to hide the flush he can feel spreading across his cheeks. “I’m a junior, but I – I go to BU.”

It’s nothing to be ashamed of, he reminds himself, even if it feels like it, sitting here in a Harvard dorm. Across from him, Mark looks surprised. Eduardo smiles, shrugs, shakes his head in an effort to seem casual. He lifts the beer in his hands to take a sip and then puts it back down when he makes eye contact with Mark.

Dustin finishes his own beer off and looks at Eduardo seriously. “If you’re not going to drink that,” he says, nodding at the beer in Eduardo’s hands, “I spent a lot of money on the fake ID I used to get it.”

“No, you didn’t,” Chris says. “You got it free from your sketch-ass cousin. You told me so yourself.”

Dustin ignores him and makes grabby hands at the beer. Eduardo hands it over, sort of relieved to be rid of the temptation. He doesn’t know why Mark seems to dislike the idea of him drinking, nor does he know why he cares if Mark doesn’t like it, but Dustin seems happy as he downs half the bottle in one go, so Eduardo decides it doesn’t matter. He picks at his fingernails to keep himself busy and relaxes into the couch, listens to Dustin and Chris bicker about whether or not Dustin is being a good host. He’s smiling when he looks away from them and finds Mark still watching him. He lifts one hand in an aborted half wave and Mark cocks his head to the side and then stands up abruptly and jerks his head toward his bedroom.

“Come on,” he says, and Eduardo gets up and follows him, ignoring the way that Chris and Dustin fall curiously silent behind them as they go.

 _♦ MARK;_ “You’re different,” Mark says when they’re in his bedroom. He’s sitting at his desk with his back to his laptop, because when they came in Eduardo had stood awkwardly in the doorway, staring at the chair and the bed, until Mark had finally sat down. Now Eduardo is sitting on Mark’s bed, pulling at a thread on Mark’s comforter and digging the fingers of his other hand into his own knee. His eyes are scrunched shut tightly and Mark is worried he’s about to disappear but then he takes a deep breath and opens his eyes again.

“Oh?” he says, scooting back on the bed a little so he can lean back against the wall. “Different how?” he asks.

“I don’t know yet,” Mark answers. “You’re just… younger, I guess.”

“I see,” Eduardo says. He’s looking at Mark curiously. “Am I much older? When you meet me?”

Mark shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “Sometimes. Your hair was longer,” he adds, pausing to watch the way Eduardo runs a hand self-consciously over his head. “I don’t know how old you were. Older.”

Eduardo nods. He’s quiet for a moment, chewing the inside of his lip. Mark experiences a strange sense of role reversal and wonders if this is how Eduardo must have felt – will feel – every time he appears in Mark’s tree house: like he has the advantage in a complicated game, because he’s the one with all the knowledge; like he’s holding all the cards. He hopes he hasn’t given the impression that he’s disappointed with the changes, because Eduardo is _here_ sitting on Mark’s _bed_ and that is pretty much the farthest thing from disappointing that Mark has ever thought. He doesn’t say that, though.

“Last time I saw you, you were probably thirty, I guess,” he says. “You had gray hair.”

Eduardo touches his hair again and Mark laughs. Eduardo’s answering smile is tentative, like it’s been surprised out of him. Mark finally puts his finger on the biggest difference between the Eduardo he has known and the one in front of him – this Eduardo is shy. Mark has never seen Eduardo shy.

He supposes, as he watches Eduardo laugh, a blush spreading from his cheeks down to his neck and disappearing under the collar of his shirt, that it is not necessarily a bad thing. When Eduardo looks up again, he says, “Why did you think I didn’t drink?”

“Because you told me you didn’t,” Mark said. “Or you’re going to. Your doctor says you’re not supposed to, but I guess you haven’t found her yet. Doctor Lee. She’s got all sorts of rules for you, supposed to stop you from traveling.”

Eduardo sits forward, smiling. “What else do you know about my future?” he asks, his tone teasing, like he doesn’t expect Mark to actually tell him anything.

Mark tells him everything.

♦ _EDUARDO;_ Eduardo does not go back to his apartment that night. He falls asleep on Mark’s bed, drifts off mid-sentence when they’ve been talking for hours. Mark is still wide awake when Eduardo starts nodding off, but when Eduardo wakes up some time later, Mark is asleep, wedged in on the bed next to him, not quite touching, but obviously comfortable with the proximity. He doesn’t know what to make of that, is too sleepy to really dwell on it, so he just rolls over, tucks his face into the crook of his elbow and goes back to sleep.

When he wakes up again, it is with a gasp as he experiences the strange sensation of falling through time, like standing up too fast and missing a step all at once. He blinks and he is no longer on Mark’s bed but stark naked on the side of a road. It’s warm and dark and he can just make out a group of children playing football a ways down the road. He can hear them laughing and shouting at each other in Portuguese.

He closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths, hopes he’ll go back; maybe this is a short trip, the sort that passes in a moment.

“Oi!” someone shouts, and too late Eduardo opens his eyes and sees that the kids have kicked their ball too far and the one who retrieved it has spotted him. There is a sudden flurry of yelling. One of them runs for their parents. Eduardo calls an apology after them. And then he turns and runs.

It’s three days before he gets back. He spends them slinking around alleys in stolen clothes, trying to keep his head down. On the second day he gets in a fight with someone who spits in his face and says, “ _Bicha_ ,” because Eduardo happens to be wearing a bright pink t-shirt with a teddy bear and the words ‘squeeze me’ emblazoned across the front. Eduardo holds his own until the man lands a hard punch to his stomach and manages to kick his feet out from under him. He kicks Eduardo hard in the gut, but Eduardo still manages to wheeze, “ _Chupa meu pau_ ,” as the man is walking away. It is worth the extra punch to his jaw it earns him.

On the third day, Eduardo finds himself in a Metrô station, huddling against a wall, clenching and unclenching his jaw and bartering with any god who might be listening to let him go home. It’s not until he sees another version of himself, fifteen and wearing a hat with the brim pulled low, getting on the train as fast as he can without looking back that he realizes where he is. Suddenly he knows without looking that there are six other versions of himself here, at least. One coming down the stairs, frozen in place now, looking like he’s choking on his own tongue, two on the train – one pulling up a hood over his hat and trying to hide, the other oblivious to his presence - one around the corner, wearing a stolen conductor’s uniform, and two hiding together, ten and eleven, whispering to each other by the turnstiles.

He squeezes his eyes shut tightly, hunches in on himself and tries to think of anywhere else but where he is. He counts to fifteen and there is a crash and a scream and a rushing in his ears and when he opens his eyes again he is in his apartment and he has just heard his mother die. Again.

 _♦ MARK;_ Mark wakes up at nine when Chris knocks on his door and says, “Mark, you have class in an hour.”

He grunts and blinks sleepily, squints in the light coming in through his window and then notices that Eduardo is gone and Mark is apparently cuddling with his shirt. He is abruptly very glad that Chris didn’t come in, because this would have been hard to explain.

Outside his room, he can hear Dustin singing in the shower. Chris shouts at him not to use all the hot water. Mark wonders where Eduardo is as he folds his clothes into a neat pile, which he sets on his chair and then stares at for a while.

“Class!” Chris shouts outside his door. “I’m not your mother, Mark, come on!”

“Alright,” Mark says. He goes to class.

When he gets back that evening, Eduardo is outside Kirkland, scuffing his shoes against the sidewalk. “Hi,” Mark says, and Eduardo looks up and blinks at him with wide eyes. There’s dried blood on his lip, a bruise on his jaw, and his eyes are red and puffy. “Oh,” Mark breathes, surprised, and Eduardo smiles shakily and then winces when it splits his lip again.

“I left my stuff,” he says. His voice is hoarse. He waves a hand towards the dorm and then stuffs it in his pocket when he sees Mark looking at the bloody scrapes on his knuckles. “My wallet, and my books,” he says, “If I could just get…”

“Have you had dinner?” Mark asks, cutting him off. Eduardo looks at him warily and then shakes his head. “Do you want to go get some?”

Eduardo licks a bit of fresh blood off his lip as he considers. “Okay,” he says finally, and Mark nods and immediately turns around and goes back the way he came. It takes a few seconds, but eventually he hears hurried footsteps and then Eduardo appears at his side, head ducked and a tentative smile on his lips.

♦ _EDUARDO;_ Eduardo goes to dinner with Mark. He goes back to his apartment. He wakes up in his father’s house ten years in the past. He eats cornflakes with his eleven-year-old self until his father walks in the door and then he blinks and he is on his ass in the middle of a busy street. A horn blares as a car comes right at him and then he’s gone again, in the alley way behind his apartment building, gasping, his hands and the back of his thighs scraped from the asphalt. He staggers upstairs to his apartment and gets dressed and goes to class. Mark invites him to his dorm and he spends the night playing video games with Mark and Dustin. He falls asleep on the couch and when he wakes up he’s still there. Chris comes back from some party he spent the night at and hands out donuts. Mark wipes a bit of glaze off Eduardo’s cheek with his thumb and then licks it off like that is just something you do. Eduardo stares wide-eyed at him until Chris asks what happened to his face. Eduardo touches the bruise on his jaw and starts thinking up a story, but then Mark tells an elaborate story about Eduardo saving a horse from a baby and all he can do is laugh.

Eduardo wakes up in his own bed. He wakes up in his own bed. He wakes up in his own bed. He wakes up in his own bed.

And then, after three months of safety and warm clothes and not having to think of excuses for missing class, Eduardo steps out of his apartment and into a forest. “Oh God,” he says, bracing himself against a tree to keep from falling over and breathing shallowly until he no longer feels like he’s about to throw up.

“You’re late,” says a boy’s voice behind him. Eduardo turns around and a boy of about eleven is standing there, skinny and short and wearing a school uniform. He’s got a head of curly hair, a heavy brow and blue eyes that have grown familiar to Eduardo over the past few months. Eduardo remembers Mark saying that his hair was longer when they met and he reaches up and touches his head, surprised to find his hair is shaggy and long, even though he’s seen it growing out every day in the mirror.

“Mark?” he says finally, gaping at the boy. Mark rolls his eyes.

“Wardo,” he says, and then he pushes some folded clothes into Eduardo’s arms and says, “That list you gave me said you’d be here an hour ago.”

Eduardo realizes as he takes the clothes that Mark is blushing, and it’s that that makes him turn away as he gets dressed in the sweats and t-shirts he’s been given. “Sorry,” he says weakly, not sure if he’s apologizing for his nudity or for the list Mark is complaining about. It doesn’t matter either way, because Mark just shrugs and then turns around and heads straight for a sort of rickety-looking tree house in a nearby tree.

Eduardo does not hesitate before following him.

 _♦ MARK;_ For three months, Eduardo is always there. Mark counts the days on his computer calendar. It’s weird for Mark, because Eduardo has never been that much of a constant. He was around a lot when Mark was growing up, sure, but never just a phone call away, never a day to day occurrence. Mark is just starting to get used to it when Eduardo disappears for a week and a half.

He doesn’t notice at first, but then it’s been three days and Chris and Dustin are hassling him about a party and Chris says, “Hey, we should invite Eduardo,” and Mark realizes what it is that’s been missing. His throat feels tight suddenly and it takes him a minute to realize that what he’s feeling is worry.

“I don’t want to go to the party,” he snaps.

Chris gapes at him. Dustin says, “Wow, rude.”

Mark ignores them. They leave. He tries to code, but he can’t focus.

It’s new, worrying about Eduardo. Mark never knew where Eduardo went when he wasn’t with him; Eduardo always appeared from nowhere, perfectly fine except for the fact that he was naked. Now Mark has seen Eduardo bruised and hurt and shaking, because Mark’s cozy tree house isn’t the only place Eduardo travels to. He’s never been good at waiting for Eduardo, but now it’s even harder and that makes him angry.

He forces himself to code and waits for the anger and frustration to go away. It doesn’t.

It gets worse.

♦ _EDUARDO;_ The sun is setting when Eduardo leaves the tree house. He ends up six blocks from his apartment and has to sprint home in the nude. He sneaks into his apartment through the fire escape, because the lobby is crowded with a bunch of students leaving someone’s party and he doesn’t want to risk any of them being sober enough to call the police on him. One of his neighbors has left a note on his door, complaining that he left his door open again and next time they find his clothes in the hall, they’re just going to keep them, but not even that can wipe the helpless smile off his face.

The first thing he does after he’s dressed is head to Kirkland to tell Mark, but when he knocks on the door after being let into the building by a group of girls who were leaving, there is no answer. He knocks again when he hears someone moving around inside and when there is still no answer, he briefly toys with the idea that he’s been gone much longer than he thought and Mark isn’t in the same room anymore. But his apartment is still his, which means he hasn’t missed rent, which means it definitely hasn’t been long enough for that, so he knocks again and calls, “Mark? Dustin? Chris?”

There is a sudden scuffle from inside and then a thud and a grunt and then Mark answers the door, stares at him with a blank expression. Eduardo grins at him. “Hi,” he says, refusing to be put off by Mark’s rather unnerving demeanor.

Mark folds his arms over his chest. He looks Eduardo up and down slowly and then his expression turns icy. “You’re back,” he says the way someone might say ‘you vomited on the rug,’ or ‘you burned my birthday cake.’

Now, finally, Eduardo’s grin slips away. “Oh,” he says. “How long was I gone?”

“Eleven days,” Mark announces before turning around and marching toward his bedroom without looking back, in that way he has of just expecting Eduardo to follow him when he leaves. Eduardo does follow him, of course, shutting the door behind him when he comes in. By the time he gets to Mark’s bedroom, Mark is sitting at his desk, clicking through a series of windows on his computer screen, all of them full of things Eduardo doesn’t understand.

“I’m sorry,” Eduardo tells him, for lack of anything better to say.

“Don’t be,” Mark snaps, not looking at him. “It’s not your fault. I know that.”

Eduardo nods, leans his hip against the edge of Mark’s desk. “It was less than a day for me,” he says. Mark doesn’t say anything so Eduardo presses, “Mark, are you going to ask where I was?”

For a moment he thinks Mark is just going to ignore that, but then his hands fall still over his keyboard and he says, without looking up, “Where were you?”

Eduardo grins again. “I was in your tree house,” he says. Marks head cocks to the side and then he looks up, finally. His lips are parted slightly, his eyes wide and his eyebrows raised. He looks open and young and pleasantly surprised. Eduardo wants to kiss him, but he doesn’t.

“When?” Mark asks.

“You were eleven,” Eduardo tells him. “I helped you with your algebra homework.” Mark nods slowly, remembering. “You accused me of being late,” Eduardo continues. “And you mentioned some kind of list.”

“The Paradox List,” Mark says, frowning, capital letters audible in his voice. “I forgot.”

The Paradox List turns out to be a list of one hundred and seventy two dates, all typed neatly and saved in a Word document on Mark’s laptop. They were told to Mark by Eduardo the second time he came to the tree house, and Eduardo is now learning them from Mark for the first time, hence the name. Mark emails him the list and Eduardo doesn’t think too hard about how it exists, because he’s found that really thinking about that sort of thing just leads to headaches. Later, Eduardo will sit in front of his laptop and read the list over and over until he has it memorized, but now he sits on Mark’s bed and asks, “How will I know when it’s the second visit?”

Mark shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was eight. You just seemed to know. I think when you showed up again I threw some clothes out the window and said, ‘You can come up, if you want.’” He pauses, lets out a breath that is almost a laugh. “I guess that’s how you knew – because I just told you that.”

Eduardo smiles at him, but doesn’t say anything for a moment. Mark is more relaxed now than he was when Eduardo arrived, but he still feels guilty for disappearing. “You looked cute in your little school uniform,” he says eventually, cheekily. Mark rolls his eyes and kicks him from his chair, but when he looks down at his lap afterwards he his smiling as if Eduardo has just inadvertently reminded him of an inside joke.

 _♦ MARK;_ “I have an idea,” Mark says one night when Eduardo is lying on his bed, stretched out on his stomach with a notebook in front of him. He’s supposedly studying for one of his math classes but Mark has been watching him in the reflection of his monitor for the last twenty minutes and he’s just been staring blankly out the window and tapping his pencil against his cheek. Now he looks up at Mark and it takes him a second to focus, but then he smiles and hums inquisitively, dropping his pencil onto his notebook and folding his hands under his chin. “I have an idea,” Mark repeats, thinking that he looks really very comfortable there on Mark’s bed, and that that is maybe the best thing in the world. Eduardo has never existed for Mark in a way that allowed him to look like that, relaxed and open and so at ease in Mark’s space.

“So you said,” Eduardo says, calling Mark’s attention back to the matter at hand. “Care to share it?” he prompts, apparently eager for a real distraction from his studying.

“Give me your notebook,” Mark says. Eduardo looks surprised for about five seconds and then he sticks the pencil into the rings on the notebook and hands it over. Mark flips to the back, rips out several blank pages, takes Eduardo’s pencil and then tosses the notebook back onto the bed. Eduardo flips it closed, apparently done pretending to work, his attention now fully on Mark, who drops out of his computer chair and onto the floor, lays out all the pages end to end and draws a long straight line across them with the pencil. The top of the line he labels ‘M’ and the bottom’ E’.

Eduardo shifts until his elbows are propped on the very edge of the bed and leans over to look at what Mark is doing. “What are we doing?” he asks.

By way of answer, Mark says, “You memorized The Paradox List, right?”

“Sure.”

“Tell me the dates.” Eduardo does, rattling the dates off slowly enough for Mark to write each of them down, marking them down carefully and in order along the ‘M’ side of the line. When he’s finished, he adds one last date at the end of the line and labels it with the date he found Eduardo in the café and introduced himself. He looks over his work and then nods, pleased, before looking up at Eduardo, who has his chin propped on his folded arms and is watching Mark curiously.

“What was the first time you met me?” Mark asks, waving a hand over the timeline he’s created. “I mean in the forest,” he adds, before Eduardo can point out that Mark already knows it was in the café.

“I told you about it already,” Eduardo says, but he still continues, “You were eleven and you chastised me for being late.”

“Chastised,” Mark repeats, rolling his eyes. He runs a finger over the line until he finds the right date. He settles on ‘October 8, 1995’, and he carefully writes a small number ‘1’ underneath it on the ‘E’ side of the line. “And the second time?”

Eduardo hums thoughtfully and rolls over onto his back to stare at the ceiling. “You were fourteen,” he says. “It was summer. You showed up late, with your hair wet, ‘cause you had to take your sister to the pool, and then we played Scrabble.”

Mark remembers that. He writes a ‘2’ underneath ‘August 26, 1998’. “Third time,” he prompts, and Eduardo tells him, and they continue until Mark has written six numbers on Eduardo’s side of the timeline. “Wardo?” Mark says, when Eduardo doesn’t immediately give him the next visit like he’s been doing. “Is that all you’ve done so far?”

No answer. Mark looks up at the bed and Eduardo is gone, his clothes lying flat on Mark’s bed, still in the same position he was in. Mark sighs heavily and turns back to the timeline.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ Eduardo does not realize he’s left Mark’s bedroom at first. His eyes are closed, he’s lying on his back, boneless and relaxed in the warmth of the Kirkland dorm, and then a cold breeze blows over him and he realizes he’s naked. He spends two days traveling – the first in Brazil (he is given clothes and a ride by a kind woman who takes him for homeless; later he steps off a train and spots himself across the crowded station just in time to hear a scream and think, _no, please, not again_ ) and the second in Mark’s tree house during Hanukkah. Mark is seventeen and he gives him a neatly wrapped gift, which turns out to be a watch that doesn’t actually keep time. “Perfect for a man out of time,” Mark says dryly and Eduardo laughs and wishes he could take the watch with him.

When he gets back to his own time, only a day has passed. He goes to Kirkland to get his notes before class. Chris lets him in and tells him that Mark is out, so Eduardo lets himself into Mark’s bedroom and grabs his notebook from the foot of the bed. He almost misses it, but when he turns around he sees a scrap of paper on Mark’s door that wasn’t there before and stops to look.

The timeline Mark made is taped neatly to his door. Mark has had to turn it sideways to make it fit and the sheets of paper reach from the very top of the door to the very bottom. Eduardo imagines Mark standing up on his toes to reach high enough to secure the highest sheet. The timeline is different now, he realizes when he looks closer; instead of just dates along Mark’s side of the timeline, there are descriptions now, some of them specific – _the time you helped prank call the neighbor kids because they egged the tree house_ and _the time you came during a blizzard and I had to smuggle you blankets and food for three days_ – and others are decidedly vague – _my eighteenth birthday_ and _homecoming sophomore year_. Most of Eduardo’s side is, naturally, still blank, but there is a pen hanging from a string on the doorknob.

Smiling, Eduardo skims the list until he finds date he needs, described by Mark as _Hanukkah 2001_. Carefully, he writes a large number ‘7’ across from it. After a moment’s consideration, he adds, _I want my watch back_ underneath it.

“Eduardo?” Chris calls. “I’m leaving. Are you staying here?”

“No, I’m going,” Eduardo tells him, smiling at the timeline for a moment longer before dropping the pen and leaving Mark’s room.

 _♦ DUSTIN;_ It’s the last day of winter break and Dustin is out on the town, living it up for the last time before he has to go back to school. Well, living it up as much as one can in a place as dull as Ocala. It’s nearing nine o’clock and most of the group of friends who came out with him have drifted off, citing early flights and trains and shifts at work as their reasons for calling it a night, but Dustin is still at it, along with two of his more irresponsible childhood friends. He’s… pretty drunk, to be honest, but definitely the more sober of the three of them, which is why he is the only one that notices when they walk past an alley and there are two people fighting in it.

Later, he will admit that he doesn’t really remember what exactly it was that drove him to turn into that alley, leaving his friends to stumble on drunkenly ahead of him. Probably some stupid hero complex, inspiring him to try and stop the fight, because one of the two guys is getting his ass well and truly beat. Any plans to save the day and encourage them to give peace a chance go out the window in exactly five seconds, though, because that is how long it takes him to realize that he recognizes one of the guys fighting – and not the one who’s losing.

Eduardo is standing over a shorter but decidedly beefier blond guy. His knuckles are bloodied and as Dustin watches he fists a hand in the guy’s shirt and pushes him against the wall, lifts his knee and slams it into his crotch. He’s shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of hot pants, which clearly don’t fit him, because they’re unbuttoned. Dustin can’t really be sure in the darkness of the alley, but he thinks he has gray hair in his sideburns.

The guy Eduardo is fighting isn’t really putting up much of a fight anymore. Eduardo closes his eyes and catches his breath, still holding the guy against the wall with one hand. He turns and spits out a mouthful of blood and then turns back to the guy and says, deadly serious, “I’m going to leave now. If you follow me, I will not leave you conscious.”

He lets the guy go and then bends over and grabs something off the ground. When he straightens up, he’s holding a shirt which might have been clean once but is now damp and dirty. Eduardo heaves a world weary sigh as he shakes it out and starts putting it on, and then, before Dustin can even consider hiding or running away, Eduardo turns and spots him.

“Dustin,” he says amiably, sounding less like he’s just been in a fist fight and more like someone has thrown him a surprise party and he’s just run into Dustin there.

Dustin stares at him with wide eyes, and then, too drunk to be afraid, he says, “Wardo, what are you doing in Florida?”

Eduardo looks around appraisingly and then nods as if confirming that yes, he is indeed in Florida. Then he says, “My father lives here,” which isn’t actually an answer when Dustin thinks about it later. “Is it 2003?” he asks, shrugging into the shirt and looking at Dustin curiously.

“Yes,” Dustin says automatically and then, “Wait, what? Why would you ask that?”

“Huh,” Eduardo says, looking himself up and down. “Well, this explains why you were worried.”

“What?” Dustin repeats. He wonders, briefly, if he’s actually passed out at that last bar they went to and just dreaming this.

“Listen,” Eduardo says, patting Dustin’s arm casually. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I’ve gotta run. See you tomorrow.”

He grins and Dustin notes with passing interest that he has blood on his teeth. “What?” he says again, but Eduardo just pats his arm again and then jogs off through the alley, back to the main road. Dustin could swear that when he gets to the end, he just disappears, but it’s probably just a trick of the light. Later, when he’s found his friends again and they’re making their way slowly back home, they pass the alley again and Dustin notices a pair of shorts and a dirty shirt lying discarded just at the edge of the sidewalk. It’s probably just a coincidence, though.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ Two things change after winter break that year. First, Mark knocks on his apartment door at eight AM the first day he gets back and announces, “Eduardo, I’ve had an idea,” and second, Dustin walks into Kirkland at noon, dragging his suitcase behind him and announces to the room at large, “I’m very suspicious of Eduardo.”

Three pairs of eyes turn to look at him and he blinks as he registers Eduardo standing in front of three whiteboards, holding a marker and looking puzzled. Mark is sitting on the couch behind him with his laptop on his lap and a second ago he was dictating what Eduardo should be writing on the boards, but now he is turned around to stare incredulously at his roommate. Chris was just walking through to his bedroom, but he stops to watch curiously as Dustin says, “Hi, Eduardo. I’m very suspicious of you.”

“Okay,” Eduardo says, nodding, with the air of someone who is used to rolling with the punches. “Can I ask why?”

Dustin thinks about that for a moment and then he says, “I think you’re probably a serial killer. Or you might have an evil twin. Were you in Ocala yesterday?”

Now Eduardo frowns. “Um,” he says, glancing briefly at Mark, who looks like he wants to laugh, before shrugging helplessly. “I don’t think so.” Actually, he was in Brazil yesterday, scrounging coins from the street and then eating cheap fast food on a bench next to his mother and his two-year-old self. It was very strange, but it was not Ocala. Still, it’s not as if Eduardo has never been in two places at once before.

“Okay,” Dustin says, rolling his suitcase out of the way and then coming to sit by Mark on the couch. “Evil twin then. Do you have an evil twin? That’s assuming you know about your evil twin; there is every chance that you don’t.”

“I don’t have an evil twin,” Eduardo says.

“I’m confused,” Chris says.

“Write ‘Myspace’ on the second board,” Mark says. Eduardo writes ‘Myspace’ on the second board.

“If you don’t have an evil twin,” Dustin says, “then how did I see you beating the shit out of some guy in an alley in Ocala yesterday?”

“Maybe you were drunk and stupid,” Chris offers helpfully, but Dustin shakes his head.

“I was, but that’s not the point,” he says. “I did see him. Seriously. He talked to me. Mark, you believe me, right?”

Mark doesn’t answer. He just stares at Eduardo, who makes a face at him, and then makes another, more dramatic face, when Mark is unaffected by the first one. He knows what Mark is trying to communicate via stare, that it’s probably time to tell Dustin and Chris, but it’s been very nice having friends and he’s not really looking forward to the two of them excommunicating him upon deciding that he’s crazy. Mark’s stare does not relent and finally Eduardo heaves a long suffering sigh and waves a hand at him. “Go ahead,” he says. At least Mark will still like him even if Dustin and Chris don’t. Probably.

“Eduardo is a time traveler,” Mark announces. He says it the same way he might have said, ‘Eduardo is Brazilian,’ or ‘Eduardo likes meteorology,’ and Eduardo cannot help but laugh as he sits down heavily in an armchair.

“Right,” Dustin says. “A time traveler.”

“I’m serious,” Mark tells him. “Write Friendster on that board, Eduardo,” he adds and then, upon noticing that Eduardo is sitting down, he huffs, puts his laptop aside and gets up and does it himself.

No one says anything for a while and then Dustin says, “Alright, if you’re a time traveler, prove it. Go back in time to this morning, buy me breakfast at McDonald’s and bring it to me.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Dustin. Don’t be an idiot,” Mark says.

Dustin is clearly about to complain, but then, by some stroke of luck, Eduardo disappears, fading into another time for a brief moment. For thirty seconds he is in a cornfield in Iowa and then he’s back in Kirkland, standing next to the chair he was sitting in, naked and a little bit dizzy. Dustin and Chris are both gaping at him; Mark hasn’t even looked away from his white-board. Eduardo fishes his boxers out from the pile of his clothes, puts them on and then leans over, braces himself with his hands on his knees and takes a few deep breaths until the vertigo passes.

“I hate when that happens,” he says finally, straightening up and starting to get dressed again.

“But you – I – you just – what?” Dustin says.

“I told you,” Mark says. “Time traveler. Wardo, come take over the board again.”

So that’s how Dustin and Chris find out. It’s also how Mark starts work on the facebook.

 _♦ MARK;_ Mark has been toying with the idea of the facebook for a while. Since the Winklevoss twins and their friend Divya approached him after hearing about coursematch, actually, but that was about a week before he left for winter break and it’s not until a few days before he goes back to school that he really decides to do it.

He’s sitting in his bedroom, thinking about how strange it is to be absolutely in love with someone who is still getting to know you and indulging in a bit of objectively creepy cyber stalking, because he finally knows Eduardo’s last name and he hasn’t allowed himself to do it yet since they met. Eduardo’s internet presence is basically non-existent, which Mark thinks probably shouldn’t surprise him since Eduardo spends a lot of time bouncing around between different decades. Still, it’s annoying to Google Eduardo Saverin and come up with nothing of relevance except for an article about his father’s company, written entirely in Portuguese, and his mother’s obituary, which mentions briefly that she is survived by her husband and her son, Eduardo.

Eduardo kissed Mark once in the tree house, gentle and soft with his hands on Mark’s shoulders, because Mark hadn’t been asked to homecoming. He’d had very sparse gray hairs around his temples then and a scar on his jaw, just by his ear, and when he’d pulled away he’d kissed Mark’s knuckles and told him, “I’d have asked you,” and then insisted that Mark needed to do his homework. The last time he saw Eduardo, before Harvard, that is, Mark was eighteen and Eduardo was trembling as he removed Mark’s school uniform and said, “I feel so dirty when you wear this, God, Mark, are you sure about this?” Eduardo had a deep wrinkle on his forehead that time, from squinting to read all the time, because reading glasses never travel with him, and Mark had been sure, and afterwards, when they were both naked and sweaty and Mark was still seeing stars, Mark said, “This is the last date on the list,” and Eduardo said, “I know. Don’t worry,” just before he’d closed his eyes and disappeared.

The Eduardo who is getting to know Mark now does not have any gray hairs and there is no scar on his jaw. He doesn’t need reading glasses and the crease between his eyebrows disappears almost entirely when he is relaxed. He is not the same Eduardo who kissed Mark in the tree house and Mark doesn’t know how he’ll figure out when he is.

He thinks, wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to know? If people walked around with big signs declaring ‘I want to suck your dick’ or ‘I’m in love with you’ and then he stops scrolling through the useless list of webpages with the name ‘Saverin’ in them and thinks, oh. He could do that. Forget an exclusive dating site, that’s boring, that’s not what people want. There are enough of those. He could do better.

So he goes to Eduardo when he gets back to school, because Eduardo is Eduardo, whether he is in love with Mark or not, and Eduardo listens to him patiently and then frowns for a long time. Eventually Mark says, “What’s wrong?” and Eduardo looks up at him, blinks a few times and then laughs.

“Nothing,” he says, “Just something I can’t quite remember. Of course I’m in, Mark. Just tell me what you need.”

Mark does tell him what he needs and then they tell Dustin and Chris about the time traveling thing, so of course a good amount of time is wasted explaining every little detail to them, but eventually things get back on track. Mark feels better with coding and designing and working to occupy his mind. Having a project keeps him busy and when he’s busy he can’t worry – not even when Eduardo disappears for two weeks before appearing in Mark’s bedroom with dark circles under his eyes and a new cut on his jaw, just next to his ear. Dustin learns to code so he can help and Eduardo coaxes Mark to bed when it gets late, whispers, “You said my future doctor said missing sleep was bad for me, and if it’s bad for me, it’s bad for you, too,” and Mark mutters that _he_ isn’t chronologically impaired, or whatever the term was, but Eduardo ignores him.

In February 2004, theFacebook goes live and Mark sits on his bed next to Eduardo, his laptop balanced on Eduardo’s knees, and he talks him through setting up his profile. (He doesn’t have a Harvard email, but Mark rolls his eyes at him when he points that out; he is the CFO, and therefore he is the exception.) Eduardo stops before he gets to relationship status, before he gets to interested in. He slouches lower on the bed and rests his forehead on his fist, looks at Mark sideways. “It’s going to work out,” he says, and then when Mark looks at him questioningly, “the site, Mark. It’s just you’ve seemed nervous and I wanted to say – it’s going to work out. I remembered, the other day, what it was that rang a bell about – well, anyway. It’s going to work out. I’ve seen it.”

Mark frowns at him and says, “That’s not why it’s going to work out.”

“No,” Eduardo says, laughing. “No, of course not, that’s not what I meant.” He grins at Mark, lazy and wide and there’s a scab on his jaw by his ear and he’s wearing Mark’s t-shirt and Mark’s sweats and they’re both too small for him and his hair is damp because before he got here he was somewhere else, somewhere where it was raining, and Mark thinks, _why not?_ And then he leans over and kisses him.

Eduardo moves Mark’s laptop out of the way before he kisses Mark back, cupping his jaw and lowering him back into the pillows, and when he gasps, “Mark, please,” into Mark’s neck some time later, Mark wonders if maybe he could have done this sooner.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ TheFacebook grows with surprising speed after that, though when he really thinks about it, Eduardo doesn’t know why he’s surprised. Mark does not do things slowly. Mark walked into his life one day when he wasn’t paying attention and within six months, he’d worked his way into every part of Eduardo’s life – his past, his future, the everyday, happening-right-now moments. Eduardo was at BU for two years before meeting Mark, but he knows that when he looks back at his time here, it is not studying alone in his apartment that he will remember, but reading his notes aloud to Mark in an effort to memorize them, because Mark is coding and not listening to him anyway. Eduardo has dated other people, but he finds it hard to remember now, how other people’s hands felt on his skin, because Mark has managed to eclipse all of them. Eduardo thought, when he first looked at The Paradox List, that Mark was like a planet whose gravity kept pulling him in. Now he knows that Mark is more like a sun that he is orbiting. He is a constant. There was never anything else to pull him away from. He doesn’t know why he expected Mark to be any different in other aspects of his life.

So it’s not long before theFacebook is a big deal around Harvard, and then Mark starts expanding, and suddenly Eduardo is a big deal around BU, too, and the next time his father calls and tells him he’s proud of him, he hardly doubts the truth of it at all. One night a couple of girls get his attention and say, “Your friend, is that Mark Zuckerberg?” and then they invite them to drinks, and that night Eduardo drags Mark into the bathroom of a seedy bar and goes to his knees, ignoring Mark’s ‘Wardo, what – oh’ completely.

He finds a letter from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, claiming that Mark stole theFacebook, and he asks Mark about it, but Mark assures him that it’s nothing, it’s not a problem, and then he pulls Eduardo into him when he sees his hands shaking and says, “Hey, come on, it’s okay. Stay with me.” Eduardo does stay with him. He focuses on doing his job, setting up meetings in New York for Spring Break. Mark fights him at every step of the way; he says the site isn’t ready for ads yet, it’s not a business yet, and he fails to see how useless that makes Eduardo in the scheme of things. He flat out refuses to go to any of Eduardo’s meetings, no matter how much Eduardo bribes and threatens him.

And then they get an email from Sean Parker. Mark changes his mind after that.

 _♦ MARK;_ “Mark, why are we here? I’ve done some research on this guy and he’s unreliable. He’s not someone you want around. He can’t even be bothered to show up on time! If you want someone else to handle the business part of things, Dustin can do it. He’s passing all his economics classes, he’s good, he’s as good as me. Better even, he goes to Harvard. I’d understand if you weren’t comfortable with a CFO who disappears all the time, but we don’t _need_ this guy,” Eduardo says, his tone verging on pleading.

This is the third time he’s said this, or some other variation of it, and Mark is starting to get a headache. With a sigh, he straightens the silverware sitting next to his empty plate and says, “Dustin can’t do any business stuff, I need him for programming.” Eduardo lets out a little ‘oh’ before becoming very interested in his plate and Mark rolls his eyes and adds, “And that’s not what I want to meet Sean for anyway.”

Eduardo nods, but he doesn’t look convinced. He does make eye contact again, though, which Mark figures is probably the best he can hope for, given the way Eduardo has been, for lack of a better word, sulking since their last meeting ended. He can’t really blame him for the sulking, if he’s honest, since the last meeting was with one of his father’s contacts and it ended sort of spectacularly with Eduardo having to excuse himself to go to the bathroom and coming back with his suit rumpled, his shirt partially untucked, and vomit on his tie. There’d been a lot of swearing on the way out; “fucking train station, how many times,” and “Mark, did you really have to keep making that _sound_?”

Mark does feel a little guilty, because Eduardo’s been traveling a lot lately – little jumps that catch him by surprise and leave him shaking and sick, and he knows that he’s not helping. Stress makes it harder for Eduardo to stay rooted in the present; Mark knows because Eduardo told him so one day when he appeared in the tree house with circles under his eyes and a sad tilt to his mouth. Maybe Mark’s been… unnecessarily difficult the last few days, but he has no patience for the meetings Eduardo’s been dragging him to, not when he’s told him a million times that the site isn’t ready for ads yet.

Anyway, the meetings are over now, except for this one, which Mark does actually want to be at, so he doesn’t know why Eduardo still looks anxious and frustrated and fidgety, like it’s a real effort for him to just exist in one place.

Eduardo opens his mouth to say something, probably to launch another argument, but Mark shakes his head and cuts him off. “Sean Parker founded Napster when he was nineteen,” he says, trying his best to sound reasonable. “Whether you think he’s reliable or not, he could have some useful insights for us. And anyway,” he adds, turning away to watch the door, “I don’t think you have any room to be making judgments about timeliness and reliability.”

He doesn’t get an answer, but out of the corner of his eye he sees Eduardo stiffen and then lean back, apparently done with the conversation. Whatever. If he wants to sulk, he can sulk. Mark has just spotted Sean Parker coming in the door.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ Mark is riled up after dinner, can’t stop talking, repeating things that Sean said like they are bits of scripture he’s quoting. Eduardo’s head started pounding about five minutes after Sean sat down across from them and he’s felt dizzy and unsteady since Sean ordered a second round of drinks – which Eduardo drank, because he doesn’t even _know_ the doctor who apparently says he shouldn’t and he doesn’t give a damn what Mark thinks right now, because Mark isn’t even paying attention. The taxi back to the hotel was excruciating, with Mark saying things like, “you want to end the party at eleven.” Eduardo doesn’t know what kind of parties Mark’s been going to, but this is certainly not his idea of a party.

By the time they get to the hotel, Eduardo’s hands are shaking. Mark is walking ahead of him, unlocking the door to their room, gesturing with his hands as he talks. Eduardo doesn’t know what he’s talking about anymore. The hotel door shuts noisily behind him, but Mark doesn’t notice. “Mark,” he says, and then, when Mark doesn’t answer, louder, “Mark!”

Mark stops talking and turns just in time for Eduardo to see him go from excited to worried before his vision goes blurry around the edges and Mark and the hotel room are gone.

Sometimes the traveling is gentle – like stepping into another room or sitting up a little too quickly. This is not one of those times. This time it is like being thrown off a tilt-a-whirl or tossed through a car windshield. Suddenly he is in the middle of a familiar forest and he’s throwing up apple martinis and sushi at the base of a pine tree. When he’s recovered, when he can take a deep breath without dry heaving, he straightens up and looks around and heads in the direction where he knows he will find clothes. He doesn’t really want to see Mark – he’s too angry, too frustrated, too hurt to deal with a Mark who hasn’t done anything to him yet. There’s really no other choice, though, because he can’t mess with the timeline – couldn’t if he wanted to – and besides that, it’s cold and he doesn’t have the energy to go looking for clothes when there’s a pair of warm sweats already waiting for him.

Mark is in the tree house already when Eduardo gets there and climbs up the ladder. He’s about sixteen and he’s flipping through a thick textbook, but Eduardo catches him watching surreptitiously as he gets dressed. Under other circumstances, he would find this amusing, might even tease him for it, but today he just ignores it, leans back against the wall behind him and closes his eyes, breathes deeply.

“Hi,” Mark says after a moment, interrupting the silence.

Eduardo sighs. “Hello,” he says, lifting his head and opening his eyes. Mark has put his book aside and is chewing on the inside of his cheek. He looks nervous.

“So, I was thinking,” he says. “There’s this party, a couple of my friends are having a party.” Eduardo’s eyebrows raise at that, but he says nothing. “I thought we could go.”

“Mark,” Eduardo starts, but he gets cut off.

“I could get you better clothes, if that’s the problem. I know some people like to dress up for parties and I thought you might like to, too, so I could get you some clothes.”

“Mark,” Eduardo says again, a little louder this time.

“We wouldn’t have to go for long, we could just make an appearance,” Mark says. “It’s just that they don’t believe you exist, so I thought it would be fun to prove them wrong, and –“

“Mark!” Eduardo snaps, closing his eyes again. He’s aware that he’s almost yelling, but it all comes out before he can stop it. “You aren’t _listening_ to me! You _never_ listen to me! I don’t want to go to any party with you, okay?”

Mark doesn’t say anything. When Eduardo opens his eyes, it is to find Mark looking hurt and not altogether surprised, as if he’s always suspected that Eduardo actually hated him all along. “Oh,” he says, but Eduardo doesn’t let him get any further than that.

“I’m sorry,” he says quickly, sinking down the wall into a sitting position. He puts his head in his hands for a minute, reminds himself that this Mark is sixteen and Eduardo is still practically his imaginary friend; this is not the Mark who is Eduardo’s business partner or best friend or boyfriend. “I’m sorry, Mark, that was – I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes I forget that you aren’t…” He trails off, shrugs.

“That I’m not me?” Mark offers. His tone is sarcastic, but he still looks sad.

“No,” Eduardo says. “Yes. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I’m already fighting with you four years in the future, I didn’t mean to fight with you here, too.”

“Do I know that?” Mark asks, and then, when Eduardo raises one eyebrow inquisitively, “That we’re fighting, I mean.”

Eduardo laughs and scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Probably not.” Neither of them says anything for a while and then Eduardo clears his throat and says, “Let’s go to that party.”

Mark shakes his head. “No,” he says. “That’s okay. We can stay here.”

“No, come on,” Eduardo says, putting on a brave face and grinning  at him even though his head is still pounding and the idea of a party full of teenagers sounds about as appealing as laying down and letting someone back a car over his arm. “I want to go,” he says, stretching out his leg across the tree house to nudge Mark’s thigh with his foot.

“Wardo, I said it’s okay,” Mark says and when Eduardo looks at him, he thinks he means it.

“Okay,” he says. This time when he smiles, it’s genuine, and Mark returns it.

“You should tell me,” Mark says later, when the sun is setting and Eduardo’s head is starting to feel fuzzy.

“Tell you what?” Eduardo asks, closing his eyes for a minute.

“That we’re fighting,” Mark says. “If I don’t know. You should tell me.”

Eduardo opens his eyes to look at him, but it’s too late. He’s not in the tree house anymore; he’s in a closed bookstore in Miami, the one he sometimes visits when he’s at home to see his dad, and a calendar on the wall tells him that it is October 1972. It is three weeks before he gets back to 2004.

 _♦ MARK;_ After Eduardo disappears, Mark codes until it’s dark outside, because he can’t think of anything to do except distract himself. When he finally surfaces, it’s because his stomach is growling and even without Eduardo being there, Mark feels like he’s scolding him. He goes to a deli a couple blocks away from the hotel and as he’s walking back, eating his sandwich on the way so that he can get back to coding as soon as possible, he sees Eduardo walking a few paces in front of him.

He catches up to him without thinking, puts a hand on his shoulder, but before he can say anything, his back is against the wall of the building next to him and there’s an arm over his chest, physically holding him there. Too late, he realizes that Eduardo is wearing baggy jeans and a hoodie. This is clearly not the Eduardo of this time, who has a whole suitcase full of suits in a hotel less than a block away, though he can’t be more than a year older than that Eduardo. His eyes are red-rimmed and glassy and there’s something dangerous about him, like he’s a wild animal who’s been cornered. Mark wonders if this is what he always looks like when he is lost in time. He decides he doesn’t want to know. “Wardo,” Mark says, and Eduardo flinches like he’s called him a name, but he doesn’t move his arm.

Instead he takes a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose. “God damn it,” he says. “God damn it, can’t I just – fuck.” He takes his arm off of Mark’s chest and steps back. “I’m leaving.”

He doesn’t leave. Mark says, “Wardo, why don’t you –“ and Eduardo all but yells,

“Don’t call me that, stop fucking calling me that!”

Mark doesn’t know what to do with that, so he ignores it and just says, “What do you need? Why don’t you come to the hotel with me?” Eduardo laughs, but doesn’t answer, so Mark adds, “Eduardo, I want to help.”

“Bullshit,” he says. “I don’t need your help. Fuck you, I don’t even know you. I’m leaving.”

This time he really does leave and Mark is left standing on the street, staring dumbly at his sandwich for a long time before he finally goes back to the hotel.

 _♦ CHRIS;_ Chris Hughes considers himself a fairly patient guy. He prides himself on his ability to be understanding and to be sympathetic to other people’s feelings and the effect those feelings may have on their behavior. He has always thought he was fairly good at dealing with people who were taking their negative emotions out on other people, but so help him God, if Mark Zuckerberg snaps at him one more time, it will no longer matter how worried he is, Chris will take his laptop and he will use it to murder him.

He doesn’t know what happened in New York, except that Mark came home alone and no one has seen Eduardo since. At first he and Dustin joked that maybe Mark had murdered him and hidden the body, but that stopped being funny after the first week. It’s been three weeks now and Mark has gradually gotten more and more unbearable. Yesterday he decided it was necessary to watch over Dustin’s shoulder as he coded and then, when Dustin made a tiny mistake, a typo in a line of code which he had been just about correct, Mark had shoved him out of the way, declared him useless and taken over himself.

Seriously. It’s getting old. Which is why, when Chris answers a knock at the door on a Friday night to find Eduardo leaning against the door frame in a suit, looking like it’s taking real effort to keep his eyes open, not to mention stay on his feet, he is so relieved he almost cries. “Wardo,” he says and he hears Mark stop typing in the other room. “Come in,” Chris says at the same time that Dustin looks up and says,

“You look like shit, man.”

Eduardo cracks a smile at that as he shuffles inside, but it disappears when he looks up and sees Mark standing by the fireplace, arms folding across his chest.

“Mark,” he says, licking his lips and taking a step towards him. He stops when Mark shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I couldn’t get back. I kept trying, but I couldn’t.”

“You’ve been gone for three weeks,” Mark says, his tone accusatory, which Chris doesn’t think is completely fair, but he’s not about to get involved.

“Maybe Dustin and I should give you guys a minute,” Chris says. Dustin gets to his feet but before either of them can escape, Mark says, “No, you’re fine,” and then, to Eduardo again, “What if I’d needed you? What if Facebook had needed you?”

“For what?” Eduardo scoffs. “It’s not a business yet, you said so yourself. What would it need me for?” He looks like he regrets saying it as soon as it’s out of his mouth, but he doesn’t try to take it back.

“You are the business head of this company,” Mark says, his voice raised just slightly, sounding agitated in a way that is very rare for him, “and you have been gone for _three weeks._ ”

“I know!” Eduardo shouts, pulling at his hair. “Do you think I don’t know? I’ve been stuck in 19-fucking-72 for three weeks, with no money, no clothes, and nowhere to sleep, Mark. I nearly gave myself alcohol poisoning trying to get back here, but apparently drinking only makes me travel when I don’t want it to! I haven’t slept in three days and I came straight over here from my apartment to check on you and your fucking website, so if you could stop _scolding me_ for something that I couldn’t control, that would be great.”

For a moment there is nothing but tense silence. Eduardo and Mark stare at each other, unblinking. Chris doesn’t think he’s been this uncomfortable since he came out to his grandfather. Finally, Mark says, “Our website.”

“What?” Eduardo snaps, incredulous.

“You said ‘your website,’” Mark says. “It’s _our_ website.”

Eduardo’s hands come up like he is imagining strangling Mark; his mouth opens and closes a few times and then he drops his hands and shakes his head. “I can’t do this right now,” he says. “I have to go get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He turns around and walks back out of the dorm. Mark stares at the door for a while, looking disappointed but unsurprised.

Then, abruptly, he turns to look at Dustin and Chris and says, “Don’t you guys have work to be doing or something?”

Chris decides that he definitely started celebrating Eduardo’s return too early.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ Eduardo wakes up around noon and at first he can think of nothing but how overjoyed he is to still be in his own bed. He’d been afraid to go to sleep, afraid he might wake up somewhere else and get stuck again, but when he opens his eyes he is greeted by the dirty ceiling of his apartment and the lingering odor of the trash that got left in his apartment for three weeks. Neither of those things is particularly pleasant, objectively, but today they are like tiny miracles.

And then he remembers fighting with Mark. In front of Dustin and Chris. Which is bad enough even without the promise of more fighting to come today. The idea makes him tired all over again, but he drags himself out of bed anyway and stands under the shower – which is cold, because he hasn’t paid his bills and frankly he is lucky he even has water, but that’s fine, he hasn’t had a real shower since New York, so whatever – until he feels marginally less like someone who has slept on the street for three weeks, and then he sits on his couch in nothing but a pair of pajama pants and starts debating whether he should go see Mark or just send him a text or something.

He is saved from making the decision when Mark walks in through his front door, holding the spare key that Eduardo keeps under the mat for his any past or future versions of himself who need a place to go. He shuts the door carefully like he’s trying to be sneaky and then he turns around and freezes when he sees Eduardo staring at him.

Eduardo doesn’t say anything. Neither does Mark. Eduardo raises his eyebrows slowly.

Finally, Mark says, “Chris says I’m being unreasonable.”

“Does he?” Eduardo says dryly.

“Also I don’t want you to hate me,” Mark blurts. “Do you hate me? Is this what makes you – do you?”

This throws Eduardo off. He was preparing a long list of reasons why Chris was right about Mark being unreasonable, but instead what he ends up saying is, “I… No.”

Apparently that’s enough, because Mark visibly relaxes. And then he surprises Eduardo again by crossing the room, sitting down carefully on the couch next to him and wrapping both his arms around Eduardo’s torso. “Mark?” Eduardo says, bewildered.

Mark says, “Shut up,” and rests his head against Eduardo’s still damp chest and after a moment Eduardo relaxes and puts his arms around Mark’s skinny shoulders. It’s strange, because Mark doesn’t usually initiate this sort of thing, but it’s nice, too, so Eduardo doesn’t complain.

And then Mark says, “I want to talk to you about something,” and Eduardo goes tense all over. “It’s nothing bad,” Mark blurts quickly, but Eduardo still doesn’t relax. Mark says, “I’m hiring interns for California, so I need – well, I have to pay them, Wardo.”

Eduardo ignores the bit about money. He doesn’t care about money, whatever, he has plenty, he can make more. Instead he says, “When did you decide to go to California?”

“Two weeks ago. Sean was right, it’s where Facebook needs to be,” Mark says. His arms tighten around Eduardo. “We’re not fighting, please stop sitting like we’re fighting.”

Eduardo relaxes fractionally. He’s quiet for a moment and then he says, “Are you hugging me right now so I’ll be more open to this idea?”

“No! Of course not,” Mark says, and then, “Well, yes, but that’s not the only reason.”

Eduardo laughs. He thinks about how much the last three weeks sucked, and how much he just wanted to get back and be with Mark, and then he thinks about how Mark looked at sixteen, like he’d been expecting Eduardo to turn on him all along, and then he sighs and relaxes into the couch, pulling Mark down with him. “Okay,” he says. “California. But we’re sitting like this for at least ten more minutes.”

“Fine,” Mark says petulantly, but he curls into Eduardo’s side as he says it, so Eduardo thinks he’s more pleased than he lets on.

 _♦ MARK;_ Time passes quickly after that. Eduardo is by his side for the rest of the term, except for when he’s not, but it’s never for a long time again; Eduardo is gone for hours at a time, never days, just long enough for Mark to notice he’s gone before he reappears. Mark works on Facebook and neglects his classes and he thinks Eduardo must be neglecting his, too, because he’s always there, putting a hand on Mark’s shoulder and luring him away from the computer with assurances that the website will still be there in the morning.

Summer comes before Mark even registers the change in the weather and then he’s sitting next to Eduardo on a plane to California. Dustin and the interns are all going home for a couple weeks before joining them, so it’s just the two of them, crammed in together in economy seats. Mark means to work on the plane. He gets his laptop out and everything, but then, moments after he gets his tray table organized to his liking, Eduardo grabs at his hand and squeezes it so hard that Mark has to bite down on a grunt.

“Wardo,” he says, quietly so that the Dwayne Johnson look-alike sitting on Eduardo’s other side won’t hear him, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Eduardo says, but when Mark looks at him he’s got his eyes screwed shut and he’s breathing funny, quick and shallow through his mouth. “Flying,” he says, as if that explains it. Mark frowns at him and doesn’t say anything else. Instead he squeezes Eduardo’s hand back and lifts it, presses it against his chest so that Eduardo will be able to feel his heartbeat. Eduardo opens his eyes long enough to give him a grateful look and Mark nods back at him.

It’s inconvenient – he won’t be able to work now, not unless he wants to code one-handed, but not being able to get anything done sounds better than trying to explain to a flight attendant where his boyfriend went and why he left all his clothes behind.

Eduardo doesn’t let go of his hand for the entire flight. The flight attendant looks at them funny when she brings Mark his drink, but Mark just says, “Nervous flyer,” and then stares her down, dares her to question him further.

It’s not until they’re in the car they rented, driving to the house Mark picked out, that Eduardo disappears. One moment he is fiddling with a knob on the car radio, searching for a station he likes and the next he is gone. Mark turns off the radio and keeps driving and when he gets to the house, Eduardo is sitting out front, wearing a thin t-shirt and a pair of ill-fitting jeans.

Mark hopes that the fact that he came back so quickly is a good sign for the summer.

It’s not.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ Being in California proves harder than Eduardo expected. It’s not that it’s unpleasant or anything – he likes California, the first two weeks before Dustin and the interns arrive especially. Mark works and Eduardo buys groceries and coaxes him into the shower and drags him out to the pool for breaks. At night Mark climbs into bed with him and kisses his shaky hands, touches the assorted scars on Eduardo’s body one by one like he’s cataloguing them. Once, when Mark has been awake for too long, Eduardo wakes up to find him hovering over him; he touches the wrinkles between Eduardo’s eyebrows and around his eyes gently, almost reverently and whispers, “You’re here,” and Eduardo feels something fragile blooming in his chest as he kisses Mark’s forehead and puts him to bed.

No, the problem isn’t that Eduardo doesn’t want to be there, it’s that he can’t seem to stay. He’s sitting by the pool with a book, or chopping vegetables for dinner, or talking to his father on the phone, and then he blinks and he’s in his apartment, he’s in a stranger’s hotel room in New York, he’s in that _fucking_ train station again.

He always gets back to California in the end, but sometimes it takes longer than he likes, and after those first two weeks he always gets back to Mark looking disappointed. They don’t fight about it. Eduardo thinks that might make it worse. He’s willing to pretend it’s okay, though, because it’s easy to do. Every time he gets back from a week in Boston or three days in Florida or an afternoon in New York there is something new to do around the house and he can fall into a routine of cleaning up after Mark and the interns and forcing Dustin to eat something other than Easy Mac and slowly easing Mark away from his laptop and into a shower or an outing or bed. Mark has taught the interns to wire in so deeply that it’s easy to make them believe that he never left at all, that he’s been here the whole time, and just when he’s beginning to think that maybe it really is okay that he can’t seem to stay in one place, he walks into the house and finds Sean Parker sitting on the couch.

  _♦ MARK;_ The zip line is Dustin’s idea. Mark is sitting at the table outside with his laptop when Dustin appears at his side, bumping him very intentionally with all of his limbs as he sits down. Mark says, “Aren’t you supposed to be wired in?”

“No,” Dustin says, which probably means ‘yes’, but before Mark can say anything Dustin leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “Mark, Wardo’s gone.”

“I’ve noticed,” Mark says, scowling. He’s about to turn back to his laptop but Dustin shakes his head and grabs his arm.

“No,” he says. “Wardo’s gone. There are no rules. We must take advantage of this time.”

And then he launches into an explanation of several elaborate plans that Eduardo would definitely disapprove of. The zip line is, shockingly, the least deadly of all of them and it does actually sound fun and so Mark relents, faux-reluctantly, on the condition that he can film it.

Later, Mark brushes dust and a little bit of rubble off of his shirt as he answers the front door. In the living room, one of the interns is laughing himself into what might be a mild asthma attack because, “Wardo is going to _kill_ you, Mark,” but Mark does not notice because Sean Parker is at his door.

“Where’s Eduardo?” Sean asks him later, after a series of awkward introductions and two smashed beer bottles and assurances that everyone was okay after the zip line thing.

Mark doesn’t actually know where Eduardo is, probably at a party in 1971, trying to drink himself into traveling, or maybe at the tree house, but he’s been marking dates on the timeline less and less lately, so it doesn’t seem likely. Either way, he can’t actually answer Sean’s question so he just shrugs and says, “He’s not here.”

“Eduardo didn’t come out,” Sean guesses. Later Mark thinks he seemed a little pleased about it, but in the moment he doesn’t notice.

Mark shrugs again. He doesn’t know how to defend Eduardo, or if he even wants to, so instead he just says, “You should stay here. If you don’t have anywhere else to go.”

So Sean stays and Eduardo is gone for a week and a half and then, late one evening, Mark is dozing on his bed, half awake and half in a dream about Dustin turning into a dinosaur, when he hears Eduardo’s voice in the living room, tense and slightly raised. He thinks it’s part of the dream at first, but then he hears Dustin’s gleeful cry of ‘Wardo!’ and he gets out of bed.

Eduardo is drenched from head to toe, like he’s been walking in the rain. His clothes are all a little too big, there are dark circles under his eyes and he’s shivering, but otherwise he seems okay, if a bit angry. Sean is standing with his hip resting against the couch, looking surprised and smug at the same time. When he sees Mark he says, “Oh, sorry, did we wake you?” but Mark ignores him.

“Wardo,” he says, “you’re back.” He’s smiling this time, not accusatory, just relieved, but Eduardo doesn’t smile back.

“Yeah,” he says. “Can I talk to you?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, just marches past Mark, down the hall and into Mark’s bedroom. Mark hears Sean ask Dustin, “Did I miss something with them?” as Mark follows him wordlessly, but he doesn’t hear Dustin’s answer, because Eduardo slams the bedroom door shut as soon as Mark gets through it. He looks at Mark for a long moment before turning around and starting to strip out of his wet clothes.

“What are you doing?” Mark asks blankly, puzzled.

“Changing,” Eduardo snaps. “I’m cold. Unless my clothes have been moved out to make room for Sean’s.” He snarls the last bit. Mark thinks it’s sort of unnecessary, especially considering the fact that he’s pulling dry clothes out of the closet as he says it.

“Don’t be stupid,” Mark says and Eduardo stops buttoning his new shirt and levels him with an icy look.

“What is Sean Parker doing here?” Eduardo asks, and then, when Mark doesn’t answer, “Mark. We don’t need him.”

“Where were you?” Mark asks. “Were you – do you need to put something on the timeline? I’m in the way.” He shuffles aside so that he’s no longer blocking the door where the timeline is hanging.

“No, I don’t need to –“ Eduardo starts, then huffs out a frustrated breath as he steps into a pair of slacks. “I’ve been in Miami in the ‘80s, and in São Paulo, watching my mother die. I don’t need to put anything on the timeline. Mark. Why is Sean Parker in this house?”

“Oh, well, that’s – but Miami in the ‘80s, that must’ve been fun, right?”

“No, it was not _fun_ ,” Eduardo snaps. “It was loud and hot and I had a splitting headache the whole time I was there and I couldn’t find anything to wear but a mesh tank top. Sean Parker does not need to be in this house. The girls, the drugs, the paranoia – Mark, he’s not someone you want involved in the startup of this company. _Why_ is he _here_?”

“He has connections to VCs,” Mark says. “That mesh tank top thing doesn’t sound so bad.”

“I have connections to VCs!”

“Yeah? Well, you’re never here!”

Both of them fall silent. Mark bites down on the urge to apologize and instead stares Eduardo down, unrepentant. Finally, Eduardo takes a deep breath and says, “When are you going to stop blaming me for something I can’t control? You knew what you were getting into, you have always known about the traveling. You _signed up for this._ ”

“No, I didn’t,” Mark says, incredulous now. “Are you kidding? I didn’t sign up for anything! You just showed up outside my tree house one day. What was I supposed to do? I never had any choice – I’ve always been stuck with you.”

Eduardo takes a step back. His eyes are wide and unfocused and he’s nodding, over and over like he’s not really aware of it. “Right,” he says. “Of course. You’re just stuck with me.”

“Wardo,” Mark starts but Eduardo shakes his head and he falls silent.

“No, right, of course, I get it. Fine. Consider yourself unstuck. I’m sure Sean Parker will be a fine CFO.”

He walks past Mark, headed for the door, and he’s halfway out of it when Mark says, “Wardo, wait.” He stops, frozen in place in the doorway. “I didn’t mean - It’s just that I want - I need you out here. I’m afraid you’re going to get left behind.”

“No,” Eduardo says. “No, I’m leaving.”

And then he does.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ The woman at the bank asks Eduardo for ID and his hands are shaking as he hands it over. He can’t tell if it’s because he’s on the verge of traveling or if it’s because he’s angry. Probably both. He hasn’t really stopped to think since leaving Mark at the house except to think that Sean Parker looked entirely too smug as he watched Eduardo go. Now, though, in the quiet of the bank, as the teller is doing something at her computer, he has little else to do, and he wonders if maybe freezing the account is the best idea. It’s going to make Mark angry, he knows, but isn’t that what he wants? To get Mark’s attention? To make sure he knows that he can’t just hurt Eduardo like that and expect him to stick around. Mark has to know that Eduardo meant it when he said he was leaving – or at least he _will_ be serious about it if he doesn’t get an apology. Anyway, it hardly matters whether or not it’s a good idea, because now the teller is handing back his ID. It’s already done.

He’s barely out of the building when there’s a tug in his gut, painful, the way that traveling sometimes is, and then he’s on all fours in his apartment, his stomach rolling with disapproval. He hasn’t had anything to eat in at least twenty-four hours, so there’s nothing to throw up, but his body tries anyway. He crawls to the waste basket beside his desk and he’s still dry-heaving into it when his phone rings five minutes later. He fumbles for the landline on the desk, trying to grab it without leaving his waste basket – just in case. It falls off its base, bounces off his head and lands on the floor next to him. Picking up the phone answered the call and he can hear Mark’s tinny voice yelling at him before he’s even said anything.

Eduardo groans. He dry-heaves into the basket again. Blindly, he hits the speaker button on the phone and Mark’s voice goes from tinny to loud and angry. “Are you even listening to me?” he says. “Eduardo?”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says weakly. Mark doesn’t seem to notice how strained he sounds, because he starts shouting again before Eduardo has even finished speaking. It’s the beginning of five long minutes of Mark yelling over all Eduardo’s attempts at explanation. Eduardo retches three times during those five minutes and not even that puts Mark off his shouting. He’d expected Mark to be mad, but not _this_ mad – Mark yelling at him over the phone, really properly yelling, Mark who never raises his voice.

Finally, Mark quiets down, but Eduardo still can’t get a word in. Before he even tries, Mark starts talking again, his voice calm now, gentle. Peter Thiel has made an angel investment he says, and then, “Wardo, are you listening? He’s setting us up in an office. We did it.”

“That’s great,” Eduardo manages, and it is, objectively. But Peter Thiel was Sean’s contact, not his, so on the less objective and more personal side of things, it feels sort of like Mark has just rubbed salt into a wound that he created. The only ‘we’ that did this was Mark and Sean. Eduardo wasn’t needed.

“It is,” Mark says. He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care how defeated Eduardo sounds, because he just presses on. “There’s all sorts of paperwork to sign and I – Wardo, I need you to come back. I need my CFO.”

One day, Eduardo will think over this moment and try to pinpoint what it is, exactly, about those words that made them sound like an apology. Now, however, he doesn’t question it, because something in Mark’s voice feels like ‘I’m sorry’. And wasn’t that what he wanted out of freezing the account?

“Wardo?” Mark prompts.

Eduardo smiles hesitantly, lets himself relax against the side of his desk. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll come back.” _Somehow_ , he adds to himself, but it would just upset Mark all over if he said it out loud.

 _♦ MARK;_ Eduardo does manage to get back to California a few days after the call. He’s got dark circles under his eyes when he walks into the new Facebook offices and he’s moving slowly, sluggishly, like he hasn’t slept in a while. He’s wearing his own clothes, though, and he’s got a bag over his shoulder and he’s smiling, so Mark thinks his flight couldn’t have been _too_ bad, even if he did have to fly alone this time.

He only has time to wave hello to Mark where he is sitting on the edge of Dustin’s desk before the lawyers spot him and wave him into the conference room. Mark watches him go, half aware that Dustin is frowning at him.  He wants to feel guilty for what’s about to happen, but then he remembers Peter Thiel’s voice asking him, “Who’s Eduardo Saverin?”, remembers the red-hot embarrassment of a bouncing check and he doesn’t. He squares his shoulders and watches Eduardo skim the papers he’s been handed. Only when Eduardo’s signed does Mark turn to look at Dustin, who doesn’t know what just happened, but knows it was something, has the hastily written sticky note on his monitor as proof. Dustin doesn’t say anything about it, though, just sighs and starts chattering about some girl who works in the Starbucks down the road. Mark nods along gratefully.

Later, when Eduardo has lost his jacket and cracked open a beer – _just one, Mark, come on, we’re celebrating_ – he turns to Mark, smiles fondly, and says, “I told you it was going to work out, Mark.”

Mark cocks his head to the side and his eyebrows pull together, but he doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t let himself stop smiling. He remembers Eduardo saying something like that, back when Facebook first went live, right before Mark kissed him for the sort-of-first-time. Remembering that now makes his stomach turn with something that is definitely not guilt but feels a little like it. He doesn’t know why Eduardo is bringing it up.

“I’ve been here before,” Eduardo clarifies. “I’ve been in this office.” He pauses and then makes a face as he adds, “Or I _will_ be in this office – I don’t know, that always confused me. The point is I’ve seen this place. I’ve seen _you_ here.”

The last is said with a grin so wide it makes Mark’s own smile falter. He shuts his eyes briefly so he doesn’t have to see Eduardo beaming with pride. He wonders if Eduardo has ever seen _himself_ in this office, but he doesn’t ask.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ He stays in California after the angel investment, for the most part. There are little trips, blink-of-an-eye trips, all of them more annoying than anything else. Mark is weird and twitchy and keeps looking at him like he’s a bomb that’s going to explode any second, but Eduardo manages to convince himself that everything is fine and Mark is just afraid he’s going to disappear, maybe. He wouldn’t blame Mark for that. He feels more grounded than usual, though, and one night he tries to tell Mark that, lying in bed, drowsy and only half awake, pressed up against Mark’s legs while he works on his laptop.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he says sleepily, touching Mark’s hand with his fingertips. “You keep looking at me like… I’m not going anywhere. I can feel it.”

Mark frowns deeply, first at Eduardo and then at their hands. Carefully, he shifts his hand out from beneath Eduardo’s fingertips, hesitates, and then pats Eduardo’s hand. “Go to sleep, Wardo,” he says, turning back to his laptop.

Eduardo does go to sleep and when he opens his eyes an hour later it’s because he’s lying on hot asphalt instead of the soft bed. He’s in Texas, of all places, for four days, but when he gets back to Palo Alto it’s only been twelve hours and there’s a note on the closet door from Mark that says, “Million members party tonight if you make it back.”

He’s tired, because he’s been sleeping on a bus stop bench for the last three nights, but Mark is probably at the Facebook offices right now, thinking about how wrong Eduardo was when he said he wasn’t going anywhere. Eduardo wants desperately to prove him wrong.

So he gets dressed and gets a cab to the office, where Mark looks mildly surprised to see him, frowns and lifts his chin at him in greeting. He wants to go over and talk to him, but before he can a lawyer calls to him from the conference room.

It’s about then that Eduardo has to stop pretending everything is fine.

He leaves the building feeling like he does sometimes when he travels – like everything is wrong and this isn’t where he’s supposed to be, except that this he’s in his own time now, he’s not traveling. He’s home and he’s just smashed Mark’s laptop and made a scene and two security guards are escorting him out of a company that was maybe never his in the first place.

He barely makes it away from his escort and into a dark corner of the street before he really does travel. It’s abrupt and unpleasant and suddenly he’s stumbling naked in the snow, surrounded by trees. The landscape is familiar, but he can’t place it, not right away. At first he just swears really a lot and tries to figure out which direction looks like the route to civilization. And then a voice behind him says, “Hey! What are you doing?”

He turns around and there is a tree house behind him and leaning out the window is Mark Zuckerberg. Eduardo thinks about the timeline pinned to the door of their – Mark’s, really – bedroom in Palo Alto and how at least a third of the dates on his side of it are still unmarked. His head hurts and he wants to scream, a little bit, but all he can do is laugh humorlessly and ask Mark the date.

Except, of course, it turns out that Mark doesn’t know him yet. Mark has never met him and of course, of course, why didn’t Eduardo realize that he hadn’t done Mark’s first meeting yet? He’d done the second, watched Mark transcribe the Paradox List in careful, neat handwriting; that had been right after Mark kissed him for the first time and he’d stared at little Mark with an expression so adoring he might as well have had literal hearts in his eyes. Just thinking about it now makes him feel stupid, but not as stupid as he feels when he realizes that the first time Mark met Eduardo is happening right now, minutes after Mark looked Eduardo dead in the eye and said, “You’re the business head of this company and you’re gonna blame me because you made a bad business decision?”

“You’re joking, right?” he says, but he knows Mark’s not. He has to explain, but he doesn’t know how. He tries to remember if Mark ever mentioned what he said on this first meeting so he could just parrot it back now, but he knows it’s no use. Even if Mark did tell him, he wouldn’t remember. He wants to say something mean, something biting – the sort of thing Mark would say, maybe, the sort of thing that will ensure Mark never brings him clothes, never invites him into the tree house, never finds him in a café and starts a company with him and dilutes his shares. “I’m a time traveler, Mark,” he says, and then he tries for mean, but it feels like he’s choking on his own tongue and he can’t make himself speak and in the end what actually comes out is, “We’re friends in the future. My name is Eduardo.”

Mark is looking at him funny and Eduardo forces himself to smile at him, because it’s no use doing anything else. He can’t change anything. That’s not how this works. It’s never worked that way.

Finally, mercifully, he travels again, leaves the tree house behind and finds himself in New York, where, after a long day of stealing and running and scrounging for food, someone grabs his shoulder. Eduardo is on edge, too focused on survival, and he slams whoever it is into the wall of the building they’re passing without thinking and then holds them there more firmly with an arm against their chest when he sees who it is.

It’s Mark, looking soft and concerned and holding a sandwich in one hand like he’s forgotten it. He says, “Wardo,” and he says, “What do you need?” and “I want to help,” and Eduardo shouts and swears in his face and storms away, wondering what it would feel like to punch Mark in the face, wondering if Mark is something he’ll never be able to escape.

 _♦ MARK;_ Mark drops out of Harvard. It seems like the thing to do, given that Facebook needs him full time and Mark doesn’t need any more higher education to be there. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Eduardo is, he’s heard, back at BU, and Mark is happy to stay as far away from him as possible. It’s not that – well, it’s just easier that way, is the thing. Especially since Eduardo started suing him. He’s seeing enough of Eduardo’s face, angry and hurt and closed off across a big glass table. He doesn’t really want to see any more of it.

The Winklevii and Divya are suing him, too, and one day Eduardo is there for that, and his eyes flick across the table to look at Mark before he actually defends him. His gaze seems to say, _this isn’t for you, it’s just the truth,_ and Mark doesn’t know what to feel. Later he glances at Eduardo’s chair and finds it empty, but he can’t remember Eduardo leaving. He wonders if there is a pile of clothes under the table. He wonders if all that hair gel travels with him.

Dustin isn’t speaking to him, which is weird and makes Mark regret all the times he’s told Dustin to shut up. He tries, once, to joke with Dustin about this, leans his hip against Dustin’s desk and says, “You know, I was joking that time I said I never wanted to hear your voice again,” but the look Dustin gives him is icy enough that Mark leaves without another word. The two sticky notes are still on Dustin’s monitor, left there like reminders.

Chris, on the other hand, _is_ speaking to him, but only because he doesn’t have a choice. Chris is in charge of PR and with Facebook in the middle of two lawsuits, there’s a lot of spin to be done. Chris is also speaking to Eduardo, which is fine, Mark doesn’t care, obviously, only it’s a little bit annoying sometimes to leave his desk to ask Chris something and find Chris on the phone, glaring daggers at him and mouthing, ‘do not come in here.’

A lawyer called Marilyn tells Mark he’s going to have to settle and he does. Facebook is fine now, Facebook is better than fine, and Mark supposes there’s no reason not to give Eduardo the money he wants. Eventually Dustin starts talking to him again, and then Chris does, too, about more than just business, and eventually things go back to normal, more or less. Mark moves into a new house and unpacks all his things carefully, puts them away in their designated places and tells himself they will stay there, because he is old enough to be at least a little bit organized. One box he leaves unpacked – a box full of expensive suits and running shorts and boxer briefs, left in his closet in Palo Alto after Eduardo left. He shoves the box into the farthest corner of his new, neatly organized closet, opening it only to add one more thing: the timeline he made, no longer taped together, but a stack of papers folded neatly into a square. He does not think about the dates left unmarked on Eduardo’s side of the timeline, does not allow himself to hope. He puts the timeline away in a box full of ghosts in his closet and that is where it stays for a long time.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ Eduardo moves to Singapore after Mark settles. He is there for exactly a week before he realizes it’s not going to work. He keeps traveling back – to New York, to Palo Alto, to Boston, to anywhere he ever went with Mark, and it’s impossible to try and live on one continent when you keep waking up in another. So he moves to New York and he thinks, as he watches movers unload the stuff he put into storage just a week ago, that maybe Mark isn’t the sun Eduardo is orbiting, but a black hole that keeps trying to swallow him up.

New York isn’t so bad, though – the city is big enough that mostly people don’t notice when he disappears randomly and it’s easier to live his life normally when he just occasionally wakes up a month in the past or two blocks away from his apartment. And it’s in New York that Eduardo finally meets the infamous Doctor Lee.

He’s sitting in a room in urgent care, waiting for a doctor, because he’s been feeling sick ever since last week when he spent a night in Palo Alto in the rain, and he has a business trip coming up and would really like it if maybe a doctor could pump him full of antibiotics and nip whatever this is in the bud. He’s been waiting for about thirty minutes and is weighing the pros and cons of inflating a latex glove to entertain himself when the doctor walks in. She’s young, or younger than the image of ‘doctor’ that Eduardo has in his head, anyway, and pretty and familiar somehow, frowning at his chart as she says, “Sorry for the wait, Mr. Saverin. What can I – _you._ ” The last is said like an accusation when she looks up from his chart and cuts off abruptly.

Eduardo blinks at her. He thinks maybe he’s seen her before, but he’s sure he’d remember doing something to warrant that kind of reaction, and he doesn’t, so he just says, “Um. Me?”

“Are you stalking me?” she asks. Her expression is furious and hard, all _try something, I fucking dare you,_ but her fingers are gripping his chart so tightly her knuckles are turning white.

“No,” he says, frowning, and then, “I think I’m getting sick? I just wondered if –“

Before he can finish his sentence, she steps into his space, grabs his head with both hands and jerks it to the side so hard his neck pops. “Ow,” he says mildly, but she ignores him in favor of staring intently at a spot on his forehead, right by his hairline.

“What the fuck,” she says. “Let me see your arm.”

She gestures impatiently at his left arm and Eduardo doesn’t really want her yanking on it like his head, so he rolls up his sleeve and shows it to her. She grabs his wrist in one hand and his elbow in the other and stares at the expanse of bare skin. Her face pales and she takes a step back. “Holy shit,” she says, “you weren’t lying.”

Two days later, Eduardo is stepping out of his apartment when he blinks and finds himself a week in the past, falling down a flight of partially remodeled stairs because he traveled mid-step. He hits his head hard on the edge of a stair and cuts a six-inch gash into his left arm on an unfinished edge of the metal rail. He stumbles out of the building and into the ER, where, as it happens, Doctor Christy Lee is working a shift.

Christy stitches up his wounds carefully and asks, “Have you been drinking, sir?”

Eduardo has blood in one eye and it makes everything blurry and red. “No,” he tells her with a lopsided smile. “My doctor says I’m not supposed to.”

“Right,” Christy says. “It’s just you showed up naked and you couldn’t seem to tell anyone your name.”

“Yes,” Eduardo says, “That happens sometimes. I’m a time traveler, see, but my clothes can’t come with me.” Saying it so casually feels as strange to him as he imagines it sounds to her, judging by the way her eyes go wide. He presses on, though. “I know you’re thinking you should call psych right now, but hold on, hear me out. You’re my doctor. Or you’re going to be.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your name is Christy Lee and you are a neurologist, but you work here twice a week and you volunteer in the urgent care on 4th street sometimes because they’re understaffed,” he says, reciting what Christy herself had told him yesterday – a week in the future? – when he’d gone to meet her in her office. “You’re working with a team studying Alzheimer’s right now, but that’s going to change.”

“How do you know so much about me?” she says warily. She’s finished his stiches now and is just standing by the bed, arms folded.

“I told you,” he says. “You’re my doctor. You will be the first to discover and understand Chronological Impairment or… something like that, I forget the term you coined. You haven’t actually coined it yet.”

“Okay,” she says in a way that clearly means _that’s crazy._ She starts to leave.

“Just watch,” Eduardo says pleasantly. “Next time you see me, there’ll be no evidence of the cuts you just stitched, because they won’t have happened yet for me.”

“No,” she says sharply. “Next time I see you, I’ll call the police.”

A week later Christy Lee ends her work on Alzheimer’s and starts studying Eduardo, which for Eduardo mostly means he has to lay very still for several MRIs and he does actually have to stop drinking for real. As time passes, Christy does actually learn a lot about Chrono-Impairment, but none of it really helps Eduardo. Running helps keep him grounded sometimes and the not drinking helps a little, too, but nothing Christy does stops him traveling completely.

Still, he and Christy become good friends and the work she does with him is going to make her very famous one day, he knows, so he puts up with her prodding him with needles and asking him questions about how traveling feels.

He’s still angry and sometimes it still feels like someone is squeezing on his heart and Mark’s face is on the cover of a magazine, but things aren’t bad, and for the most part he’s forgotten about the unfinished timeline.

Until one day he blinks and finds himself standing naked in the forest. He remembers the timeline then.

 _♦ MARK;_ Mark glances up briefly when his office doors opens, narrows his eyes at Chris standing in the doorway, and then immediately turns his attention back to his computer. “Hold on,” he says. The only answer he gets is a heavy sigh, which is melodramatic and annoying and inspires him to take a little longer than is actually necessary to finish the email he’s writing. He proofreads his email before sending just to waste a little more time and then, finally, he looks back up.

Chris hasn’t moved from the doorway, but now his arms are crossed over his chest disapprovingly. “Mark,” he says, “what are you doing?”

“Answering emails,” Mark tells him. “What are you doing?”

Chris ignores him. “I think we should talk about this,” he says.

“About my emails?” Mark asks, purposely obtuse. “I thought we finished with the etiquette lessons a long time ago.”

“Mark,” Chris snaps, exasperated, at the same time that someone sneezes and a single blue crayon comes rolling out from underneath Mark’s desk.

“Oops,” says a soft, childish voice and then a boy of about six with a head of thick, dark hair comes crawling out from beneath the desk.

Chris bends up to pick up the crayon and give it back to him. “Bless you,” he says.

“Thanks,” Eduardo says shyly. He takes the crayon and disappears under Mark’s desk again, jostling Mark’s knees as he settles in.

“Mark,” Chris says again and Mark can tell he’s trying to impart some great meaning into his name, but when he looks up, Chris just looks sad. “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”

Mark briefly considers saying no, but he knows Chris will just keep asking, or worse, he’ll send Dustin in, so instead he gets up wordlessly and goes out into the hall, shutting his office door behind him.

“This has to stop,” Chris says the second Mark turns to face him.

“What do you want me to do, Chris? Send him away?” Mark asks, echoing a thousand conversations before this one. There’s no real fight in his words anymore; they’ve had this same argument too many times.

“You keep clothes in your office! Kids’ clothes, Mark,” Chris says. He’s bent down slightly so that he can look directly into Mark’s eyes as he attempts to implore him to see sense, or whatever it is that’s happening here. Mark wants to tell him that he’s not a child and Chris doesn’t have to get down to his height, but instead he just keeps his mouth shut. “This isn’t healthy.”

Mark looks back into his office, where Eduardo has come out from under the desk and is leaning over it to reach the bowl of candy by Mark’s keyboard. The t-shirt and shorts he’s wearing are a little too big and they hang loose on his skinny limbs as he goes up on his toes and accidentally knocks over Mark’s stapler.

“He keeps coming back,” Mark says, turning back to Chris. “I have nothing to do with it. I don’t know what you want me to do. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to.”

“Do you want to?” Chris asks.

There’s a clatter in his office and when Mark turns to look, the candy dish is overturned on the floor and there’s a pile of clothes next to it. Eduardo is nowhere to be seen.

“I don’t know,” Mark admits and Chris sighs.

“Look,” he says, straightening up and rubbing his temples with one hand. “Just… take him home next time, okay? People are starting to ask questions.”

Mark nods and Chris leaves, but they both know nothing is going to change. Back in his office, Mark picks up the spilled candy piece by piece and carefully folds the clothes into neat little squares. He sits with them in his lap for a long time, considering, and then he puts them in the drawer in his desk and goes back to work.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ The first time Eduardo goes back to the tree house is in 2006. He’s visiting his father in Miami, and he’s on his way out of the house, going to pick up groceries to make dinner, when suddenly everything sort of tilts thirty degrees to the left and when it straightens out again, he’s in the forest. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust, because Miami was bright and sunny, while the sun has already set here, but when they do he spots the tree house in the distance.

He wants to be angry that he’s here again, but from where he’s standing, he can see a pile of clothes sitting on the window ledge, and there’s a piece of notebook paper pinned to the tree trunk. He can’t make out the words, but the writing on it is unmistakably Mark’s, lopsided and messy and written in blue marker, probably because it was all he could find. The Mark he’s going to see here is not the same Mark who stared at him blankly across the table during the depositions, who settled and signed everything away as casually as someone might swat a fly.

Anyway, being angry would be pointless. He’s never been able to change anything, no matter how much he wanted to, and this won’t be the exception. There are still dates on the Paradox List. Mark has to get stuck before he can unstick himself. Eduardo has to be complicit in his own heartbreak.

So he goes to the tree house and plucks the note off the tree before going up to get dressed. The note reads ‘ _I know I’m late, but my aunt is in town and I couldn’t get out of dinner. It’s stupid. Sorry.’_ Eduardo smiles helplessly at it and then takes a seat on the tree house floor. Several of his joints crack as he’s getting settled; he’s too old for this.

Mark arrives almost an hour after Eduardo and when he comes up the ladder, Eduardo is lying on his stomach, paging through a book about programming. It’s sort of like reading Greek, but everything else he could find was even more advanced, way over his head. He turns, chin propped on his hand, when Mark comes in and then immediately laughs.

“Shut up,” Mark says half-heartedly. He’s about seventeen and he’s wearing neatly ironed, crème colored slacks and a blue button down that is a little too big for him, tucked in messily and buttoned all the way to his neck. His hair has been pressed flat with product, parted severely down the middle, and he has the remnants of a lipstick kiss on his cheek, though he’s clearly tried to wipe it off because the whole cheek is red. He’s holding a tin foil swan and, most importantly, Eduardo thinks, he is wearing a bowtie. “Shut up,” Mark repeats, and this time Eduardo quiets his laughter and attempts a solemn expression.

“Sorry,” he says. “You look dashing.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Mark says again, going red from his poorly parted hairline to his neatly buttoned shirt. “My mother insisted.” The bowtie turns out to be a clip on, because he snatches it off easily, tosses it into the corner of the tree house without looking. “Stop laughing,” he says, dropping the foil swan on the floor by Eduardo’s head. “Eat some pasta, you asshole.”

Eduardo grins, and it’s weird, the way that it can hurt and feel right at the same time. That visit is a brief one – Mark has barely finished angrily rubbing at his gelled hair with his hands when Eduardo disappears – but after that it’s like the door has been opened and suddenly Eduardo almost never travels anywhere else. He’s in the tree house constantly and it always leaves him feeling hollow and lonely and a bit like he wants to drink an entire wine cellar, and then, one day, it doesn’t.

Looking back, he will realize it happened more gradually. That the anger and hurt became less and less every time Mark greeted him with a smile or snuck food to him from the house by hiding it under his t-shirt or in the pocket of his hoodie, until one day he comes up the ladder to find Mark surrounded by piles of pamphlets and college apps and feels nothing but fondness.

“Obviously Harvard is my first choice, but I don’t know how realistic that is,” Mark says, in lieu of a ‘hello.’ “NYU wouldn’t be so bad and my dad likes Brown, which is ridiculous, and my mom likes Columbia and the guidance counselor keeps pushing MIT, and –“

“Harvard,” Eduardo cuts him off, pulling the t-shirt Mark brought him over his head. “You should go to Harvard.”

Mark looks up, blinks at him. “You’re making that face where you know something I don’t,” he says.

Eduardo laughs with his head tipped back and says, “Maybe I do,” and it doesn’t feel at all like he just signed his own death certificate. It feels more like he did himself a favor.

 _♦ MARK;_ Chris warned him before the event that Eduardo was going to be there, and that was fine, when Mark thought that all he would be doing was giving his speech and leaving. It became less fine, however, when, after Chris finished making Mark practice his speech over the phone he said, “Also, there’s been a change of plans and you have to go to the after party now. Eduardo will be there. Do not fuck up.”

And then he’d hung up, leaving Mark to compose three different angry texts, none of which he actually sent. Mark has seen Eduardo since the lawsuit, but Eduardo was six for most of those meetings and the one time he wasn’t he’d been on the other side of a ballroom, sipping champagne and wearing a tux and smiling at the woman who was talking to him. He looks good, when Mark sees him in the crowd before his speech; he looks happy in his neatly pressed suit with a smiling woman in an expensive dress on his arm, and it’s not that Mark has regrets, not exactly, but… Well, what he did might have been the best thing for Facebook, but he’s come to realize that it might not have been the best thing for him. So regret isn’t the right word as far as he’s concerned, but he does miss Eduardo and maybe watching him lean down to whisper into his date’s ear and come away wearing a grin that Mark used to be very familiar with, maybe that makes him a little jealous. He’s never discussed these things with anyone else, of course, because Dustin and Chris _would_ call that regret and Sean… well, he doesn’t want to talk about it with Sean. He’s had plenty of time to reflect on it to himself, though, during hours spent looking after a child-sized version of his ex-boyfriend / ex-business partner / ex-best friend.  

So that’s why, after his speech, he finds himself standing next Eduardo at the bar and saying something half-hearted about the weather. Eduardo is looking at him with barely concealed rage and up this close Mark can see that there’s a new scar by his hairline and the drink in his hand is not alcohol, like he assumed, but soda.

“Did Chris put you up to this?” Eduardo says finally, after staring at Mark for a long time.

“What? No,” Mark says. In fact, Mark would go so far as to say that Chris would probably put this conversation under a heading of ‘fucking up,’ which he explicitly told Mark _not_ to do. “I just wanted to – well, I thought maybe I should – make amends?”

“Make amends,” Eduardo repeats. “Are you fucking kidding?” His voice is barely more than a whisper, but he looks around anyway like he’s checking to make sure no one else heard him.

Mark shrugs, uncomfortable. He opens his mouth to say something but Eduardo keeps talking. “You think I want to make amends with you?” he says, leaning forward at an angle that makes Mark feel tiny. “Last time you extended a metaphorical olive branch it turned out to be nothing more than a ruse so you could screw me out of your company. Why would I ever want to do that again?”

“No,” Mark says, “I can see how it might look like that, but that wasn’t what I –“

“You can see how it might look like that?” Eduardo cuts him off, absolutely incredulous. He huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. “That’s great, really.”

“Wardo,” Mark starts, because he’s frustrated and the nickname comes easily, still, natural on his tongue. Something flashes in Eduardo’s eyes when he says it, though, and then Mark gets cut off again.

“I was leaving,” Eduardo says. His expression is angry and pained and at first Mark is confused, but then he continues. “You said you felt stuck and I left, I was leaving, and then you _called me back_ , just to kick me out again. Why would you do that? Just to have the last word? To make sure I knew it wasn’t my choice? Why would you – I was _leaving!_ ”

That last comes out louder than the rest, almost a shout. Several people around them fall silent and turn to look, but Eduardo doesn’t seem to notice. He just stares at Mark, his jaw clenching and unclenching. The drink in his hand is shaking, because his hands are trembling, and Mark wants to explain, except he doesn’t know how, and he wants to reach out and comfort him, but he doesn’t know how to do that anymore either. Before he can do anything at all, Eduardo’s date appears at his side, lays a hand gently on his arm, and says, “Wardo.”

He flinches away from her at first and then, just as quickly, relaxes and leans into her touch.

“Calm down,” she says sternly, though there’s an air of fond familiarity beneath it. “Don’t disappear on me now. I don’t know anyone here and I don’t have a bag to hide your suit in.”

Eduardo nods slowly. He sets his drink down on the bar and covers her hand with his. “Excuse me, Mr. Zuckerberg,” he says, giving Mark the briefest of nods, and then he lets her steer him away before Mark can respond.

Mark stays at the bar, turning his glass around on the polished wood counter top and staring at the rings of condensation it makes, wondering how much trouble he’s going to be in with Chris tomorrow. He’s been doing this for maybe five minutes when someone leans against the bar beside him and says, “Aren’t you sort of the star of the whole evening? Shouldn’t you be mingling?”

“I just gave a speech. That’s enough for one night,” he says automatically and then he frowns and actually looks up when he realizes whose voice that was. Eduardo is standing next to him, staring out into the crowd with his elbows on the bar behind him. He’s wearing the exact same suit he was wearing just a few moments ago, but there’s more gray in his hair now and there’s stubble on his jaw that wasn’t there before. Mark frowns at him, but he’s not looking. He smiles at someone in the crowd and nods once and when Mark follows his gaze, he finds the woman who led him away sitting at a table not too far away, watching them carefully.

“I’m not sure your PR team would agree with that,” Eduardo says, turning back to Mark. His lips are turned up very slightly at the corners, almost a smirk.

“I don’t have a PR team,” Mark tells him. “Facebook has a PR team. Contrary to popular belief, that is not the same thing. Aren’t you supposed to hate me?”

Eduardo’s head falls to the side slightly, considering. “I don’t know. Am I?” he asks, like the idea hadn’t even crossed his mind.

“You were just yelling at me,” Mark tells him, even though he clearly knows that, because he knew about Mark’s speech which means he must know what night it is. Eduardo just hums thoughtfully and nods, so Mark adds, “How am I supposed to apologize when you always cut me off?”

That actually seems to surprise him, because his eyes go wide and his mouth hangs open for just a second before he says, “Were you going to apologize?”

“I don’t know,” Mark admits and Eduardo nods like that’s more what he expected. “I might have,” Mark says defensively, and then, because this Eduardo seems more open to listening to him, “I just miss you.”

“It’s not that simple,” Eduardo says, but he sounds sort of sympathetic. “You’re going to need more than that. I’m very angry with you, and very hurt.”

“Present tense?” Mark asks and Eduardo shrugs.

“It’s complicated,” he says, eyes twinkling. Mark rolls his eyes.

“I just don’t understand. I wanted you out of Facebook, but I didn’t want –“

“It’s not that simple,” Eduardo says again, serious this time. “It wasn’t just that you kicked me out of the company, Mark. I mean, that was part of it, obviously – that you could do that, in that way, but more than that… You always knew what that would do to us, to me, and you did it anyway. You saw me in New York that day. You were afraid of me hating you, but you still did it.”

“I didn’t know the dilution was what would cause it,” Mark argues.

“You’re a smart guy, Mark,” Eduardo says. “You figured it out.”

And yes. He did. But – “You always knew, too, Wardo. You saw the offices, but you never saw yourself in them. You’re just as smart as me.”

Eduardo smiles sadly at him for a moment before turning to look back out over the crowd around them. “It’s not that simple,” he repeats, more to himself than to Mark. Across the room, his date is making wild eyes at him and tapping her wrist where a watch would be, if she was wearing one. Eduardo sighs. “That’s my cue,” he says. “See you, Mark,” and then he turns and walks away, weaving through the crowd and out of the room.

A couple moments later, he comes back in, adjusting his cufflinks, but the gray hair and the stubble are gone. He doesn’t so much as look at Mark for the rest of the night.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ It’s 2011 and Eduardo is sitting at his desk in his office, eating lunch and watching a video his assistant emailed him, when his phone vibrates across the desk with a new text. He pauses his video to check it. It’s from his cousin and it reads ‘ _facebooked you the deets about the wedding.’_

Eduardo texts back, ‘ _can’t you just text them?’_ because he doesn’t hate the website he helped create anymore, but he doesn’t really use it, either, not for anything personal, and it’s not particularly convenient.

His cousin doesn’t care about his convenience, though, apparently, because he replies, ‘ _no because I already facebooked them,’_ as if that means they cannot be sent again, and Eduardo sighs and opens a new tab. He’s got approximately a million new comments and likes since last time he checked in, because apparently contributing funds and snacks and then suing the CEO of the company makes him sort of a celebrity on here, but only two new messages. One is from his cousin, as expected and the other is… more of a surprise.

The second message is from Mark Zuckerberg, who Eduardo does not remember friending, but he supposes that sort of thing doesn’t matter to Mark. He stares at it for a long time before finally opening it.

_I’ve been working on a new feature. You’re the only one who can see it. Hope you like it._

Underneath that there’s a link to Mark’s Facebook. Eduardo wonders if maybe he’s missing a joke, or if someone has maybe hacked Mark’s account and decided to fuck with him. Mark hasn’t tried to talk to him since running into him twice at an after party and he’s certainly never done anything remotely close to asking for Eduardo’s opinion on _Facebook_.

Still, he follows the link to Mark’s profile, which is… different. Instead of the usual wall, there’s some kind of graph. Before he can investigate further, though, a giant blue bubble pops up with the text ‘ _WELCOME TO THE NEW TIMELINE. PLEASE CLICK HERE.’_

‘Here’ is followed to an arrow, which points to the first of a line of years on the right side of the page. Eduardo feels like his heart is trying to claw its way out of his throat, but he clicks anyway and immediately the page jumps to the bottom of the screen, where the first date is ‘May 14, 1984: Born.’ Beneath that Mark’s parents and hometown are listed. The blue box pops up again, smaller and on the side and instructs him to ‘ _SCROLL UP, PLEASE.’_

He scrolls up. The next date on the timeline is December 19, 1992 and the description reads, _Eduardo appears outside my tree house for the first time._ Beneath that, the text: _E.S.: ?_

And it goes on. Mark has transferred the entirety of the Paradox List onto his Facebook. Dates that Eduardo never filled out on the timeline are all marked _E.S.: ?_ , but dates that he did fill out are marked as such. _E.S.: 1_ is marked as the day Mark found him in the café, _E.S.: 2_ as the day Mark scolded him for being late, and so on. All of Mark’s original descriptions are included, but some – homecoming and Mark’s eighteenth birthday among them – have been elaborated on.

By the time he reaches the end, he’s dizzy and breathless and chewing on his thumbnail. The last date on the timeline hasn’t happened yet. It’s a Facebook shareholder’s meeting, two weeks away. Eduardo remembers getting the invitation to it – he’d thrown it away, he thinks, like every other obligatory invitation he’d received. There is no description – just a question mark beneath the heading.

Eduardo stares at the page for a long time, doing nothing. He’s still staring when his assistant knocks on his door and says, “Eduardo, your one o’clock is here,” and he hurriedly shuts the tab and says,

“Yeah, yeah, of course.”

He spends the rest of the day thinking about it on and off and getting very little work done, but it’s not until much later, when he’s lying in bed unable to sleep, that he decides to respond.

 _It looks good. You’re missing some data, though,_ he writes back, followed by a neat list of all the dates marked with question marks, listed in the order they happened for him.

The thing is, he stopped expecting Mark to apologize a long time ago. He’s not sure if he ever really expected it at all, honestly, but he thinks, if Mark _had_ apologized, really, properly, apologized… He thinks this is what it would have felt like.

He RSVPs yes to the meeting.

Of course, then he’s late to the meeting, because halfway out of the airport he has to dart into the bathroom because he’s feeling light-headed, and then he spends four hours in rural Mississippi. Through sheer luck, he gets back before his abandoned laptop bag, which he stashed behind a toilet, has been found, but someone _has_ found and removed his suit, so he has to collect his checked baggage and get a taxi while wearing the t-shirt and trousers he stashed with his laptop in case of emergency. He doesn’t have time to change before the meeting if he wants to be on time, but he also doesn’t really have a choice. He walks into the Facebook offices almost ten minutes late and then spends five minutes panicking, because the young girl at the front desk wants a photo ID before she’ll let him in and he’s pretty sure his photo ID was in the pocket of the suit that he lost in the airport – which he realizes now is probably going to get him into trouble, but he’ll deal with that later.

He’s about to do something drastic, like call Mark, when Dustin breezes past him, hands in his pockets, whistling. He smiles at the girl at the desk, nods at Eduardo and for a moment, keeps walking and then – he whips around abruptly, gaping. “Wardo?” he says. “Do my eyes deceive me? Are you a mirage?”

Eduardo slumps a little with relief and says, “Mark didn’t tell you I was coming?”

The girl at the desk looks back and forth between them and then says, “He doesn’t have ID.”

“That’s okay, Annie,” Dustin says. “I’ll vouch for him”

Annie doesn’t look entirely pleased with that answer, but she presses her lips together and nods before handing Eduardo a visitor’s pass. Dustin shepherds him away to the elevator, muttering about how Mark has clearly been holding out on him, but Eduardo ignores him because he’s too busy working himself into a panic wondering if coming here was the right choice.

He’s seconds away from bolting out of the building when Dustin nudges him towards a conference room with glass walls – eerily familiar, but bigger, new – and says, “Go on in, I’ve gotta grab some stuff.”

And Mark is in there. Eduardo can see him, sitting at the head of the big table, nodding as a woman leans over his shoulder to tell him something. Someone has got him into a suit, but he’s already got the jacket off. His tie is crooked and he keeps pawing at his stomach distractedly like he’s looking for a pocket to put his hands in. He’s tapping one finger on the table over and over and his eyes keep darting around the room, from face to face and to the door. All of that is enough to stop Eduardo in his tracks for a moment, but what makes him start moving again is this:

Someone catches Mark’s attention and he nods at them, briefly, before turning back towards the glass wall. He frowns, scanning the office and then his eyes settle on Eduardo. His mouth opens slightly and his head tips back, surprised, and then he smiles, close-lipped and pleased, and raises one hand to give Eduardo a little wave.

And suddenly Eduardo isn’t so nervous anymore. He goes into the conference room and he sits through the meeting – which is boring, even by his standards, though to be fair he’s a little bit impatient. He’s not actually here for business, after all. Afterwards, when everyone is leaving, Mark gets up and bypasses several people who try to start conversations and shake his hand, heads straight for Eduardo instead.

“You came,” he says, and Eduardo raises his eyebrows and doesn’t say _obviously._  Mark licks his lips and shoves both hands into the pockets of his trousers and says, “Do you want to go eat? With me?”

“Sure,” Eduardo says. He smiles and Mark smiles back and they go to a tiny little pizza place and Mark gets tomato sauce on his nice shirt and when they’re finished eating, Eduardo lets himself lean across the table and kiss him. Mark’s eyes are wide and bright when he pulls away and Eduardo grins at him. It’s risky, maybe, and most people would probably say it’s too fast for their fresh start, but Eduardo doesn’t see much point in waiting. Maybe they’ve broken each other’s hearts before and maybe they’ll do it again, but maybe - maybe Mark isn’t a planet, or a sun, or a black hole or anything at all. Maybe he’s just Mark; stupid, wonderful, occasionally patronizing Mark. Maybe Eduardo just loves him. It doesn’t really matter either way. All Eduardo knows is that his side of their timeline is all filled out and he has no interest in leading a life without Mark in it – and time has never been something Eduardo can afford to waste on taking things slow.

 _♦ MARK;_ Eduardo just visits from New York, at first, after the meeting. He shows up at Mark’s door frequently: sometimes carrying luggage and breakfast burritos, sometimes stark naked in the rain or wearing nothing but stolen jeans, and almost always unannounced. He says he likes surprising Mark with visits because it means Mark has to leave the office more regularly, but Mark thinks he just likes the way Mark’s face looks when he opens the door expecting take out and gets Wardo instead.

Mark starts leaving him a key under a little gnome by the front door after the first time Eduardo has to spend a night curled up on the stoop in stolen clothes because Mark has a Code Red Facebook Emergency to deal with and Eduardo doesn’t have a phone to call him with. That’s about three months after the meeting and it’s only a month after that that Eduardo shows up at his house with two enormous suitcases and a sheepish expression. He rubs at the back of his neck with one hand and says, “So, I keep traveling here, you know, and at this point I’m almost never actually in New York and my assistant is starting to complain, so I figure maybe I should just… move out here. If that’s something you’d be okay with.”

Mark pulls him inside with a handful of his stupid fancy shirt and shows him exactly how okay with that he is.

Things are good after that. For a while, Mark feels like maybe he’s the victim of a really elaborate, cruel episode of Punk’d, because he never really had a lot of hope that his attempt to reach out would work this well. At most he thought maybe Eduardo would start being sort of cordial with him at events they both attended, maybe start coming to shareholder’s meetings regularly. He’d spent ages debating over whether or not to reach out again after his failed attempt at the party, trying to think of a way to figure out when Eduardo crossed the line from hating him to smiling at him sadly. But there was no website he could create for this, no box he could make Eduardo tick, _check here when you have gone back in time and comforted me after homecoming_ , _select this option if you have slipped your hands under my school uniform and taken me apart gently with your fingers, with your mouth, click this button if you forgive me._ In the end he’d remembered kissing Eduardo for the sort-of-first-time on his bed in Harvard and thinking he could have done it ages earlier, and it had seemed so silly to keep wasting time. So he’d created the timeline and he’d sent it off before he could change his mind and he’d resigned himself to be happy with whatever forgiveness Eduardo had to give him.

And somehow, by some stroke of happy ending luck, he’d gotten Eduardo arguing with him over how many windows were actually necessary in the house they were buying together and Eduardo tucking his icy feet under Mark’s thigh while he read on their couch and Eduardo kissing him goodbye every morning and making faces at him from behind people’s backs at events and hogging the blankets at night. It takes him a long time to realize that it’s real, that he gets to have it, but after he moves to California permanently Eduardo stops traveling almost entirely, and then he’s always there, reassuring and warm and real. Sometimes Eduardo disappears for a few days or a few hours, but he always comes back, and sometimes Dustin pinches Marks cheeks and makes fun of how prominent his dimples have become, but Dustin doesn’t have Eduardo dancing around in his kitchen to pop music while he makes diner, so Mark supposes he has to forgive him that.

Eventually, though, Mark’s happy ending luck runs out, as happy ending luck tends to do. It’s a Tuesday and Mark has been in Europe on business for a week. He’s forty-seven and Eduardo is forty-nine – roughly, Eduardo will say, because he’s never been clear on how everything works, whether or not the time he spends _out_ of time adds to his age or not – and Mark spends the cab ride from the airport to the house texting Chris about their plans to throw a party for Eduardo’s fiftieth next week and thinking of all the things he’s going to do to Eduardo when he gets home. Except when he actually gets home, Eduardo isn’t there. There’s a bowl of milk on the counter with a few pieces of cereal left in it and Mark finds their dog lying on Eduardo’s pajamas, which are in a pile in front of the bathroom sink. The faucet is running and Eduardo’s toothbrush is on the floor.

Mark doesn’t think much of this. He turns off the water, picks up the toothbrush and the clothes and goes to bed early, feeling little more than a lingering disappointment that he will have to wait a little longer to pin Eduardo to the mattress and explain to him exactly how much he missed him.

But then Eduardo is not back the next morning, or the morning after that, or the morning after that, and then it’s been almost a month and Eduardo’s assistant reports him missing and Mark feels sick to his stomach. There’s an investigation and the police come to the house – Mark tells them that he hasn’t seen Eduardo since his business trip, but that Eduardo gets called away for surprise business trips sometimes and Mark hadn’t really worried about not hearing from him, because he’d found his cell phone on the dining room table and just figured he’d forgotten it. Several people confirm that Eduardo disappears sometimes and that it’s not surprising Mark could have missed the lack of contact – _he probably got lost in his work,_ Dustin tells the police seriously, lying through his teeth, _Mark does that sometimes_  - but the police keep sniffing around anyway. After two months, Mark is actually arrested and he has to shell out a good amount of money to hire a very expensive defense attorney.

He’s eventually released, but there are always rumors that maybe the prickly Facebook CEO snapped and killed his longtime sweetheart. No one finds these rumors funny except for Sean, and even he stops laughing when a year goes by and Eduardo still hasn’t turned up.

 _♦ EDUARDO;_ It’s a Tuesday morning and Eduardo is brushing his teeth and counting the gray hairs in his reflection. It’s recently come to his attention that he’s turning fifty in a week, because Chris texted him to warn him that Mark was plotting a surprise party – _I didn’t want to accidentally startle you into disappearing or something_ , Chris says, which Eduardo figures is probably a valid fear – and now he is having what he thinks is the beginning of a mid-life crisis, in spite of the fact that he’s probably been fifty for quite a while now if you take all his little time traveling side trips into account. Mark is getting back from a business trip tonight and Eduardo is thinking about ordering Chinese or making tacos for him while he counts gray hairs. He’s leaning forward to get a closer look at the wrinkles around his eyes, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, and then suddenly his reflection is gone and he is looking at the lights of an oncoming train.

Over the roar of the train, he hears the too familiar thud and scream of his mother’s death, and he knows there is nowhere to go. This was always going to happen. This has happened already. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again, he is in the tree house and it hurts just to draw breath. He tries to call out, but he can’t make a sound louder than the ragged gasping of his breath, can’t move because his body is too broken to obey him. But from where he’s lying on the tree house floor, he can see down the ladder, and Mark is there, eleven years old, practicing Latin verbs and pacing – waiting for Eduardo.

Eduardo watches him for an hour, struggling to stay awake, to focus on Mark’s curls, Mark’s voice, the set of Mark’s shoulders, instead of the pain. Eventually, after an hour, another, younger, version of himself appears in the trees.

“You’re late,” eleven-year-old Mark says.

“Mark?” says the Eduardo out in the trees, surprised.

In the tree house, Eduardo closes his eyes and remembers being that version of himself, young and half in love, touching his hair and being surprised to find it had grown. “Wardo,” Mark says, “That list you gave me said you’d be here an hour ago.”

 _I was_ , Eduardo wants to say, _I am,_ but he still cannot speak, or move, or even cry, though he wants to. Out in the woods, eleven-year-old Mark leads Eduardo to the tree house.

It’s empty by the time they climb the ladder.

 

 _♦ MARK;_ Mark is very old. His hair has gone white and his fingers are wrinkled and freckled with age and he’s so arthritic that the simple act of walking is difficult. It’s been many years since he last saw Eduardo, but he still knows the exact amount of days it’s been since he came home and found Eduardo’s clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor. It hasn’t gotten easier, waiting for him, but he supposes it hasn’t gotten harder, either. Mostly these days he codes. It’s nothing important, his coding, because he finished changing the world a long time ago, but it’s something. It keeps him occupied. The carpal tunnel is a bitch, but what else is he going to do? Garden?

It’s late, and his office has gotten dark around him, but he can’t be bothered to get up and turn on a light. He can see well enough by the light of his computer. The setup of his home office hasn’t changed since Eduardo helped him set up the three enormous monitors, with their fancy mounts and their flashing lights. He doesn’t know if that’s because he’s been lazy or sentimental. He’s thinking about calling it quits for the night and going to bed - on the futon, maybe, so he doesn’t have to walk all the way to the bedroom - when there is a quiet sound behind him, a sort of squeak of surprise.

Mark stops typing. He lifts his head. His shoulders straighten. There is another sound, a sort of soft shuffling against the carpet. Slowly, he swivels around in his chair.

There is a naked five-year-old sitting in the middle of his office.

Eduardo looks up at him with huge eyes. He says, “Am I dreaming?”

Mark’s heart clenches in his chest. Distantly, he wonders if he is having a heart attack. There is a blue hoodie draped over the back of his chair and Mark grabs it and slowly, very slowly, gets out of his chair. He aches all over with every movement. When was the last time he took his pain medication? He doesn’t know. He kneels on the floor and offers the hoodie. Eduardo takes it and wriggles his way into it. It’s much too big.

“Am I dreaming?” he asks again.

“No,” Mark says, watching him run his thumb over the Facebook logo that’s sewn into the hoodie.

“Then who are you?” Eduardo says. Mark wonders about the heart attack thing again. “Where am I?”

“You’re safe, Eduardo,” Mark tells him, his tone practiced and soothing. He picks Eduardo up, groaning with the effort, and sets him down again on the futon behind them. “You should get some sleep,” he says.

“You didn’t answer my questions,” Eduardo says petulantly.

Mark wants to laugh and he wants to cry, but he does neither. He looks at Eduardo for a long moment, chewing his bottom lip thoughtfully, and then he sighs and holds out his hand for Eduardo to shake. “My name is Mark,” he says. “You’re in my office.”

Eduardo shakes his hand very seriously. A heart attack wouldn’t be a bad way to go _,_ Mark thinks, but what he says is, “Nice to meet you, Eduardo. Go to sleep.”

He lays down on the futon, but doesn’t close his eyes. Mark stays where he is, watching him, and eventually Eduardo says, “Mark?” Mark hums in reply. “Why am I here?”

“I wish I knew,” Mark says. He climbs up off the floor and sits in his chair again.

“It’s my dad’s birthday today,” Eduardo says sleepily. “We had a party.” He shuts his eyes.

“Happy birthday to him,” Mark whispers. Eduardo snores.

Mark forgets about the code he was writing. He watches Eduardo sleep until he drifts off himself, propped up uncomfortably in his desk chair. He dreams of Eduardo, smiling at him across the table in their breakfast nook, Eduardo with gray hairs in his sideburns and a scar on his jaw and a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows.

At some point during the night, the five-year-old Eduardo sleeping on his futon disappears, but Mark never wakes up to see it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Gorgeous Fanart](http://savetomorrow.livejournal.com/23171.html) by the lovely [savetomorrow](http://savetomorrow.livejournal.com/).
> 
> There's several parts of this fic that I originally meant to elaborate on, but then life happened and I had to scale my original outline back. Maybe I'll write those other parts one day. Maybe not. 
> 
> And now on to the 'thank you' portion of the evening! A huge thank you to my beta, [Tiffany,](http://adelagia.livejournal.com/) for putting up with me and generally being an angel, maybe. Also thanks to [Venla](http://savetomorrow.livejournal.com/) for being the loveliest artist in the history of artists, and to my best friend [Phillis](http://achilleswaresanecklace.tumblr.com), for listening to me whine and sending me a series of encouraging messages in spite of the fact that she's not even in this fandom. Y'all are the best. Remind me to bake you some cookies or something.


End file.
